Gnostic images in the visual culture of modernity

The visual culture at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century demonstrates a persistent interest in gnostic motifs, manifesting in film and media art as well as in performative, architectural, and bioart practices. The focus of the study is the analysis of visual forms in which gnostic knowledge is realized not as iconography but as a way of experiencing otherness, loss, and sacred rupture. The object of study is the visual culture of modernity as a field of representation of sacred knowledge in a post-secular context. The subject of the research includes gnostic images and their interpretation in contemporary visual practice—from cinema and bioart to installation, performative, and architectural forms. The emphasis is on the ways in which gnostic optics transform into visual codes that are not reducible to illustration but act as initiation, a gap in the sign, a challenge to the sensual. Special attention is given to how contemporary art uses light, emptiness, silence, and fragment not as formal techniques but as structures of sacred experience. Gnostic visuality is viewed as a form of pneumatic knowledge—not conveying meanings but invoking anamnesis. The research relies on the philosophy of the visual as a method of analyzing media representation of the sacred, the phenomenology of the image—to reveal the ontological status of the visual motif, hermeneutics of the symbol—for the interpretation of archetypal structures, and gnostic ontology—as a metaphysical framework for reading visual experience. The main conclusions of the study assert gnostic visuality as a special type of imagery manifested in contemporary artistic, performative, and cinematic practices, identifying mechanisms of remythologization of sacred experience through images of light, fragment, silence, and decay. The study shows that the gnostic image acts not as an iconographic sign but as initiation—through perceptual and bodily experience. The scientific novelty lies in the interpretation of gnostic motifs—Sophia, the demiurge, tripartite anthropology, pleroma—in the context of contemporary visual culture, as well as in the introduction of the concept of iconic neomyth as an aesthetic strategy for restoring sacred form outside of tradition, through light, silence, and emptiness. A unique contribution of the author is the development of an interdisciplinary approach that connects gnostic ontology of the image with the phenomenology of perception and the philosophy of visual experience.

gnosticism, visual culture, contemporary art, phenomenology of image, iconic neomyth, pleroma, performance, bioart, archetype, remythologization