HAMBURG.- Since 2024, the exhibition and discourse series Viral Hallucinations develops a set of critical tools to archive, analyze, discuss and reflect on the current iterations of photographic and photography-mimicking images, circulating on algorithmic media. Conceived by Nadine Isabelle Henrich (Curator of the House of Photography and Head of the Center of Visual Media, Deichtorhallen Hamburg), the series develops publications and hosts workshops, lectures, exhibitions, performances, research- and world building-sessions to weave the tissue of research and conversations for the new Center of Visual Media at Deichtorhallen Hamburg, set to open its own space in Winter 2027.

This third volume of the free publication series is published as part of the discourse program framing the exhibition Philip Montgomery—American Cycles at Deichtorhallen Hamburg, curated by Nadine Isabelle Henrich. The publication is available in print and online. The exhibition is expanded by an audio commentary by Ocean Vuong.

"Protest optics looks beyond the imple­mentation of facial recognition technologies into the power dynamics between who needs to be visible at all times and who gets to stay in the shadows." – Sheung Yiu, artist and researcher

Edited by Nadine Isabelle Henrich and Mona Behfeld (Researcher, Center for Visual Media), the free publication explores a spectrum of interconnected protest cultures and strategies of digital mobilization—ranging from civic engagement to networked propaganda. Taking images circulating online as its starting point that prepare for, accompany, and perpetuate protests through evolving visual strategies, it traces how photographic practices and political realities mutually shape and transform one another.

The publication includes a glossary with visual examples by Behfeld, Sarah Gramotke, and Viktoria Rochambeau (curatorial fellows, Deichtorhallen Hamburg), with commentary by Gwen Schlüter (research assistant, Berlin University of the Arts and Free University of Berlin) and Dr. Dorna Safaian (art and media scholar), as well as visual and text-based essays by international artists and scholars, including Maria Rosario Montero (artist and researcher), Henrich, Mykola Ridnyi (artist and visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts), Dr. Simon Strick (cultural and media studies scholar), and Sheung Yiu (artist and researcher).

The glossary introduces key terms to build a vocabulary that allows to analyze how networked political participation and mobilization work online. The essays deepen the glossary’s foundations by exploring the ambivalence of visibility in the tension between protest and photographic documentation, using the example of the protests in Chile in October 2019, the systematic blinding of demonstrators through police violence in Chile, Egypt, Georgia, Kashmir, Palestine, and Ukraine, the strategic image-manipulation tactics of digital fascism—which cannot be adequately captured by terms such as “fake news” or “disinformation”—as well as the strategies employed during the 2019 Hong Kong protests to circumvent surveillance.

The free publication will be presented as part of the event “Bildgewalt im Netz” on Sunday, April 19, from 3 to 5pm at the exhibition “Philip Montgomery—American Cycles” at Deichtorhallen Hamburg. The exhibition maps the protests, solidarity movements, uprisings and recent political movements negotiating contemporary America’s fragmented social tissue. Together with cultural and media studies scholar and author of “Right-Wing Sentiments: Affects and Strategies of Digital Fascism”, Dr. Simon Strick, Nadine Isabelle Henrich and Mona Behfeld will examine current images from public social media accounts in a Critical Live Scrolling session. In doing so, they will focus on a form of political influence that can be described as the exercise of state power through images and memes—as “visual dominance”.

“Visual dominance”, in Strick’s words, describes “a currently dominant paradigm of government action under Trump II. People are arrested, and the reasons are deliberately fabricated to generate “clicks” and “outrage”. To understand the current visual spaces of quasi-fascist regimes, memes must be described as part of their executive branch: "memetic state terror".

Philip Montgomery—American Cycles is on view at Deichtorhallen Hamburg until May 10, 2026.