“Dealing with images has changed fundamentally in the age of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media,” explains Julia Höner. Shared cell phone photos and videos have become the most important means of personal expression for a broad public. Both banal moments from the lives of users as well as documentary images from the global hotspots of the present day are distributed millions of times on the Internet. Images have considerable affective potential that plays skillfully with the emotions of the recipients. “The images move the user; they are ‘liked’ en masse or provoke protests, induce criticism or unrestrained attacks; they instigate public debates and appear to create a sense of community. They show up again and again, posted or published in new contexts, altered with image editing programs or imitated in new footage,” explains Kerstin Schankweiler. The exhibition presents works from nine international artistic positions that refer to the new phenomena of social media imagery and select particular pictorial material that draws its energy from the context of global political conflicts and civil-social protest on the Internet. Their work reflects the usage and the semantics of these images as well as considering their aesthetic qualities. Sometimes, they allow us to delve deep into the places and events of our world in upheaval. “Sometimes, the artists take a more distanced view. They elucidate the mobilizing power of the images and demonstrate how these images create facts and thereby operate along the porous border between reality and fiction,” explain the curators. In dealing with digital image phenomena, the artists provide insights into the emotional constitution and excitement dynamics of contemporary societies.