Workshop: Your JPEG Is Showing
Your JPEG Is Showing is a three-session writing workshop led by artist Jelsen Lee Innocent, exploring what images reveal beyond what they intend. Open to all, no writing or photography background required, the workshop examines how visual culture extracts consent, attention, and complicity from viewers, often without their awareness.
Participants will collectively engage with images, still and moving, to confront their interpretations of society and their place within it. Together they will explore, scan, speak, look, and write to practice what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls counter-visuality (The Right to Look, 2011): a refusal of the dominant visual order. Drawing on writers including bell hooks, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Christina Sharpe, the workshop treats writing not as a craft to perform but as a tool to re-orient what an image does, what it hides, and what it asks of us.
Your JPEG Is Showing is part of Scaffolding, a series of critical writing workshops hosted by artists and writers that explore conceptual, ethical, and political questions in relation to image-making and cultural practice. The series is part of Fotogalleriet’s broader public programme, committed to building sustained spaces for thinking with and through images.
This workshop is free, and intentionally small, limited to 10 participants to allow for close, collective engagement. Please secure your place early.
Session 1: LOOKING AT
Date: Saturday, 5 Sept
Time: 11:00 to 14:00 (includes 30-minute lunch break)
The workshop opens with an undirected walkthrough of Crystal Bennes’s The Island, The Mine, The Resistance Gardens at Fotogalleriet, followed by the cohort’s first conversation. Drawing on W.J.T. Mitchell’s question of what pictures want from us, the session establishes the workshop’s premise: images are not neutral, and looking is not passive. Short writing exercises invite participants to put first words to what they have seen, beginning the shared vocabulary that will carry across all three sessions.
Session 2: LOOKING WITH
Date: Saturday, 19 Sept
Time: 11:00 to 14:00 (includes 30-minute lunch break)
The cohort works with the contested images they have brought. Drawing on bell hooks’s oppositional gaze, the session moves from describing what images do to articulating where viewers stand in relation to them. The scanner enters the workshop here: each participant scans an object, a fragment, or a response to their contested image, using the slowness of the machine to surface what fast looking misses. Writing exercises asks participants to name not only what they see but where they stand.
Session 3: LOOKING AFTER
Date: Saturday, 26 Sept
Time: 11:00 to 14:00 (includes 30-minute lunch break)
The cohort gathers the images they encountered between sessions and responds to them collectively, without rehearsal. Drawing on Christina Sharpe’s wake work, the session attends what images leave behind: their afterlife, their effects, their demands on those who come after. Writing exercises invite participants to compose in the wake of the image: what trails behind it, what it makes the viewer carry. The session closes with a read-around drawing on the cohort’s writing across all three Saturdays, and a final addition to the shared vocabulary.
Jelsen Lee Innocent (b. 1983, NYC) is a Haitian-American interdisciplinary artist based in Norway. His research and studio practice examine the lasting impacts of imperialism across social hierarchies, built environments, and visual culture. Integrating intellectual history, installation-making, and participatory initiatives, his work surfaces narratives that challenge hegemonic structures and open space for alternative imaginaries.
Innocent founded the discursive platform Peer Review (est. 2024) for cultural analysis across Black visual culture. Since its establishment, Peer Review members gather for monthly in-person meetings at Atelier Kunstnerforbundet and field trips that host a space to respond and reflect on Black expressions in art, media, and popular culture.
He has exhibited internationally, including at Iwalewahaus (Germany), the 32nd Biennial of Graphic Arts (Slovenia), Culture Art Society (Denmark), the Smithsonian’s Men of Change traveling exhibition (US), Kunsthall Trondheim (Norway), and Nitja Senter for Samtidskunst (Norway).