Thirtysix Cursed Photographs
An image called ‘cursed’ is one – usually a photograph – that is perceived as mysterious or disturbing because of its content, its poor quality or a combination of both. A cursed image causes someone to question the existence of the image in the first place. Such images have become popular since the Tumblr blog 'cursed images' in 2015, and are widely tagged and shared on social media.
In this work, Santiago Martinelli has reinterpreted photographs from Instagram accounts labelled as cursed images by re-photographing them several times and then materialising them into a film of thirty-six photographs. This re-photographing and printing causes the images’ ghostly auras to come to the surface, whereby new insights emerge. In form and content, the photos thus function as questions, the answers to which will depend on who they are asked to.
