Elizabeth Prendiville of Saffronart shares a note on the latest MAGASIN curatorial project

I cannot trust quotations. They always lie, because essentially they are paratruths. Speak with your own words, clumsy, unconvincing and unintelligible, but yours. And don’t forget that every fable is a potential truth.

Anonymous

New York: The MAGASIN Centre National d’ Art Contemporain  in Grenoble, France will be presenting a multifaceted exhibition both online and in house organized by The Ecole du MAGASIN. “I lie to them”-Based on a True Story will be presented June 9^th through September 1^st, 2013.  This educational curatorial collective has created an exhibition that depicts the relationship between lies and truths in storytelling and the chronicling of histories. The exhibition invites artists to manipulate and distort the contrast between reality and fabrication when representing images of traumatic historical experiences such as war.

This reshaped representation creates a dialogue between viewers and the artists about what is real and what has been reimagined in this particular illustration.

In observing these works, viewers are asked to determine if they are illuminating the truth or if they are an additional repurposing of the true history.

Works by artists such as Riikka Kuoppala and Bani Abidi, will be displayed in a variety of mediums including photography and film, utilizing actual historical news coverage reconfigured in a new way. In viewing this work, visitors are asked to determine for themselves what is true and what is a lie.  This identifies a common thread in the repurposing of stories in the mainstream media.

The curators through this exhibition question whether to authentically understand a traumatic event we have to have actively experienced it first hand.

The exhibition covers events such as World War II, the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina and terrorism in a three-pronged approach: the detachment  between the emotional gravity of the event and the narration, the reoccurring thematic elements of these histories, and the importance of reassessing these stories as a learning tool.

By displaying these works artists also address the emotional aftermath of these harrowing events and how it determines the mentality of a society long after the actual event. Because The Ecole du MAGASIN has curatorial participants from various countries such as Italy, India and Russia, this exhibition truly takes a global approach to the manipulation of unofficial histories in our contemporary world.

“I Lie To Them”-Based on a True Story is sure to be a memorable and intriguing exhibition for visitors of the MAGASIN.

More information can be found here.