Originally published at This is Tomorrow, 3 September 2015, photography Chris Park © Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

An analysis of the properties and conduct of research, accessibility to and use of collections and the contexts for systematised information form a pairing in Talbot Rice Gallery’s summer festival exhibitions. The late German artist Hanne Darboven features in their principal spaces while in TRG3 – a smaller, circular space dedicated to emergent practices – is the Swiss-born, London-based artist Fabienne Hess.

Lengths of printed fabric enfold the gallery’s oval space. They feature a mass selection of digitalised images from the University of Edinburgh’s academic collections. Among the drapes, and set against a wash of black and parchment beige, are uniform miniature images of scores, musical instruments, pressed flowers, architectural details and clusters of sepia-toned portraits. Prominent images are those set principally in primary colours: an alert red book jacket, vivid blue pottery, an abstract print in dominant yellow. The remainder coalesce in a visual jumble; the mind seeks for patterns, repetitions or the appearance of human faces. Meanwhile a second small room in the gallery hosts two high-definition screens. Each plays a slide show of isolated high-resolution images, annotated by the number of its online viewership. The number of times a reader has called up the image for scrutiny. A Japanese woodcut from the eighteenth century boats 200 views, while an Eadweard Muybridge film frame showing men on horseback in canter gathered none. All proxies, giving dimension to objects, celluloid, papers too sensitive to be present themselves.

Images of texts: writing, letters, law documents or illustrated manuscripts, remind us that these are descriptions of reading, and point to its internal processes. Musical instruments and their scores are objects for sound and hearing, while images of action: gestures, sports, people in movement are all physical records. These documents are of things where vision is not necessarily the dominant sensation. Hess brings to our attention that images are portraits of and for all living senses.

Most acutely for her project here are of images as acts of interpretation, perception and recognition. She considers their existence in the University’s collection, the properties of acquisition, validation and worth. Seeking to subvert these conditions an online element to Hess’s project curates the collection into sequences of sub-sections with arbitrary titles like ‘a person raising an arm’ or ‘an image containing a triangle’.  The results are a collage of similarity and vague association.

A gallery interpretative text describes the show as ‘exploring our disorientation and bewilderment in the face of vast quantities of digital information’. Hess easily disputes this claim: she and we luxuriate in these dense fields of imagery, navigating this multiplying terrain with ease, acting with acuity armed with digital apparatus. What I think is sought here is an intermission, a point of rest to the unbalanced consumption the gallery text alludes to. To take a pause and observe on the pace we give each image. The action of its capture, its conjuring, its secured storage, its embedded worth and status, its availability and its passing. To see Hess’s project in this way makes this work about the operations and solidity of institutional memory and the fragility or unreliability personal memory, of its human timeline, decline and death. The exhibition’s most potent statements then are of images of ‘not anything’, blanks, white pages, things not viewed, the disappeared, images at their most minimal, most dormant.