19 - Jordan Beal - Lineaments

Jul 6, 2026 – Oct 4, 2026

For Jordan Beal, photography and artificial intelligence share a common ground, a collective imaginary composed of archetypes and inherited narratives that shape our perception even before we are consciously aware of them. It is this pre-perceptual moment, these interiorized visual representations, these codes of exoticism—or of what a tropical paradise looks like—that the artist questions here, taking his native Martinique (Madinina)—an island marked by colonial history and fantasized in the collective imaginaries—as a terrain for exploration. In his practice, Beal doesn’t perceive AI as a rupture, but rather as a reactivation of the extractive colonial logics: the extraction of data and imaginaries following that of bodies and lands. His artistic and critical gesture consists of photographing with a Polaroid SX-70 images generated by AI and displayed on screen. This hybrid transfer materializes the immateriality of AI-generated images, giving rise to an aesthetic of saturation, blur and chemical instability. The Polaroid thus becomes a fragile translation tool, producing unique, poetic relics that resist immediate comprehension. Truth operates here on a bodily level and affects before decryption. Through vibrations of warm colours, indecisive shapes, granular textures or the intimist snapshot format, images act physically, arousing sensations even before delivering a clear meaning. Following Edouard Glissant, Beal proposes a relational and situated truth, made of traces and resistances instead of complete accounts. They give an appearance to the lineaments, these tenuous lines of force of a rhizomatic memory that exists in opacity and communion. Photography becomes hereby a critical method in which truth is not given, but rather constructed and fabricated in and through the image, as an ethical condition of the gaze and all visual truth. Nadine Hounkpatin