The Art of Navigation. How to Get Lost in a World of Images

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Image courtesy of FotoColectania.

The internet has redefined the concept of navigation, shifting from maritime exploration to an analogy for browsing websites and virtual environments. While maps were traditionally created as visual representations of the measured world to aid orientation, images have increasingly become the very fabric of digital spaces. Today, photographs are actionable—clickable, swipable, draggable—and no longer merely depict a place or event; they construct the space itself.

The exhibition examines photography’s evolving role in digital culture, highlighting its relevance across a wide range of interconnected technological contexts, including video games, social media platforms, autonomous vehicles, space exploration, and online mapping. These profound changes in visual culture are unfolding in an increasingly complex global landscape marked by overlapping struggles and crises. Disorientation has become one of the defining emotions of the 21st century, fueled by technological fragmentation, acceleration, and the hybridization of our physical and virtual experiences. While traditional Western navigation aimed to reach a fixed destination, new forms of movement have emerged in which learning to get lost has become a meaningful and critical approach for many artists.

The Art of Navigation brings together different ways of (dis)orienting, moving through and inhabiting a hybrid visual world. The title is drawn from a 16th-century book on maritime navigation published by the Spanish Crown, alluding to the enduring colonial legacy found in today’s digital and networked photographic practices. The exhibition’s subtitle, How to Get Lost in a World of Images, seeks to challenge the extractive colonial spirit of the original text and the history of navigation itself, suggesting alternative strategies that embrace disorientation as a tool of resistance.

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