The limits of our seeing have continued to dissolve through unflagging technological development; we have striven to make visible what was formerly not and reveal its hidden wonder for centuries. While the idea of the primacy of vision might still lurk in our habitual seeing, artists have thrown out caveats as to its fruitlessness for decades, as surveyed in the 2012 exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. Invisible to us is not necessarily absent or empty. Rather, the invisible is filled with a richness obtained outside vision, be it perceptual or imaginative, the exhaustion of which has made possible a range of multi-sensorial and critical engagements with the world that surrounds us.

Yves Klein (1928-1962) freed the very essence of painting, or what he called sensibilité picturale, from the confines of the medium’s formal aspects, allowing visitors to his 1958 show at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris to embrace its immaterial energy directly and with immediacy. More sinisterly, Mexican Teresa Margolles’ Air (2003) basks us in air humidified with water used to clean murdered bodies prior to autopsy. For the artist, no graphic pictures can be more powerful than the particulate traces of the dead to speak of the violence faced by the victims. The invisible also significantly enhances our senses. Chris Burden (1946-2015) tested this by making himself unseen from viewers during his durational performance piece White Light/White Heat (February 8-March 1, 1975) at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York. Provided with nothing worth looking at, they were forced to “experience the art through other means than mere looking, and conceptually to connect visibility to invisibility” (Stiles 2007).

The session invites papers focusing on the use and implications of the invisible in art from different eras, regions, and media. Papers may discuss diverse inconspicuous materials (e.g. transparent glass) as well as physical and psychic energies (e.g. heat, radiation, or telepathic ones). The emphasis can be placed on, but not limited to: the specificity of each invisibility in its manifestation of concrete reality; the ways in which the invisible affects or augments our non-visual methods of knowing; invisible artists and/or viewers; the interactions between the visible and the invisible in artistic creation; the invisible through which to better approach social, cultural, political, or ecological issues.