The complex gestures of artwork remain an under-explored theoretical topos in contemporary visual culture studies. In In this volume, contributors ask: How may one speak not only of the gestures of the body but also of the gestures of the image? What constitutes gesturality in the image and, more broadly, what are the gestures of the aesthetic itself? By thinking about images within this conceptual framework, this volume seeks to renew our understanding of the image.

Asbjørn Grønstad is professor of visual culture in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen. He is founding director of Nomadikon: The Bergen Center for Visual Culture and author/editor of several books in film studies and visual culture. He is also founding editor of the peer-reviewed journal Ekphrasis: Nordic Journal of Visual Culture. His most recent book is Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image (co-edited with Henrik Gustafsson, 2014).

Henrik Gustafsson is Associate Professor of Media- and Documentation Science at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Recent publications include Cinema & Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image (2014) and Ethics and Images of Pain (2012), both co-edited with Grønstad, and articles in History of Photography (February 2016) and Journal of Visual Culture (April 2013).　　

Øyvind Vågnes is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway. Recent publications include "Lessons from the Life of an Image: Malcolm Browne's Photograph of Thich Quang Duc's Self-Immolation", in Frances Guerin, ed., On Not Looking: The Paradox of Contemporary Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2015), and Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture　(2011), which received honorable mention at the American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence.

Foreword: Offering a Light, Suspending Air (Pasi Väliaho)

Introduction (Asbjørn Grønstad, Henrik Gustafsson and Øyvind Vågnes)

1. Retracing Movements: Gestures on Film (Ulrike Hanstein)

2. Gesturing the Image: The Chain-Linking of Gestures in Jean-Luc Godard's Passion (Petra Löffler)

3. Cinematic Gestures between Henri Michaux and Joachim Koester (Jay Hetrick)

4. Voiceless: Gesture as Witness or the Un-image-able/Un-inagine-able (Mark Ledbetter)

5. Radical Gestures of Unfolding in Films by Mohamed Soueid and The Otolith Group (Laura U. Marks)

6. Gestures of Touch in Recent Video Art: Towards a New Haptic Mode (Susanne Ø. Sæther)

7. The Gesture of Drawing (Ernst van Alphen)

8. The Common Gesture: Drawing in Relation (Sara Schneckloth)

9. THE MAGNETIC: 'Apricot City A4' and its Weak Gestures (Nermin Saybasili)