DPI Closing Reception: Poetics of the Photographic: Language of Resistance Opens at Clive Davis Gallery, January 24
Join us in celebrating the exhibition Poetics of the Photographic: Language of Resistance at the NYU Clive Davis Gallery on January 24, 2026!
Reception: January 24, 2026 5:30pm - 7:30pm
On view: November 9, 2025 – January 28, 2026 (Closed 12/19 – 01/22)
Curated by: Rose DeSiano, Dept. of Photography & Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
About the Exhibition
Poetics of the Photographic: Language of Resistance Poetics of the Photographic: Language of Resistance brings together artists who push photography beyond its material limits, using its grammar of light, index, and trace to examine how images operate as tools of investigation and interrogation—means through which histories are not only recorded but actively contested. The works gathered here are photograph-adjacent: sculpture, poetry, drawing, and performance inhabit photography’s conceptual terrain without adhering to its traditional conventions.
Through this expanded language, the artists cultivate an ethics of looking that acknowledges social and political devastation without replicating its harm. Drawing on photography’s syntax, they reimagine how images can function amid social and political fracture. Acts of staging, reconstruction, and generative practice probe photography’s central paradox—its ability to preserve and to unsettle, to hold absence as a form of testimony.
Their works confront inequity and erasure from multiple angles: some employ intimacy and performance as defiance; others construct fragile worlds of ruin and renewal; still others resurrect suppressed or censored images, transforming omission into evidence.
Together, these artists turn photography into a political gesture—an ethics of attention that creates space for both rupture and repair. They reclaim beauty as a mode of resistance, demonstrating that even within the debris of injustice, the photographic image can become a site of empathy, reflection, and radical possibility.
Press Contact: Jasmine E. Scriven < j.Scriven@nyu.edu>
Department of Photography & Imaging
Tisch School of the Arts, New York University | 212-998-1930