The Theatre is Lying

ACCA is pleased to present the inaugural Macfarlane Commissions, encompassing major works by Anna Breckon and Nat Randall, Sol Calero, Consuelo Cavaniglia, Matthew Griffin and Daniel Jenatsch. Curated by Max Delany and Annika Kristensen, and constructed as an exhibition in five acts, The Theatre is Lying brings together artists who create alternative narratives and worlds through illusionary, cinematic and theatrical devices. In a series of new commissions, participating artists explore the manipulation of information and images, notions of artifice and illusion, ideals of transparency, reflection and phantasmagoria, and an engagement with the representations and misrepresentations of cinema and media.

Through the white cube of the gallery and the black box of cinema, The Theatre is Lying proposes the gallery as a transformative threshold addressing ideas of truth and fiction, perception and abstraction, and the warping of time and space. The exhibition also considers the role of the spectator as an active agent in a world in which we are all actors, and the increasing interplay between subjective and objective, or psychic and social structures. Set against theatres of media and politics that are increasingly informed by trickery and sleight of hand, The Theatre is Lying offers a means to reflect upon, critique and even escape—if only momentarily—the everyday reality of our fictive life and times.

Artists’ projects include:
Following the success of their critically acclaimed 24hr performance work, The Second Woman, Sydney-based artists Anna Breckon & Nat Randall have developed an ambitious 90-minute take on the clichéd genre of the road movie that operates at the nexus of cinema, performance and installation. Rear view is shot in a single take, yet features a script constructed from hundreds of citational cinematic excerpts of women in cars to bring together the high, low and middle from the history of Australian and Hollywood cinema in a comical reflection on post-modern taste hierarchies.

In a new site-specific architectural installation, Venezuelan-born and Berlin-based artist Sol Calero references the complex histories of colonial translation and cultural transmutation that have informed constructions of Latin identity and aesthetics. La puerta presents the physical and metaphorical threshold of an archway, decorated in black and white on one side, and brilliantly coloured on the reverse in homage to the vitality of Latin American Baroque painting that emerged during Spanish colonisation.

Consuelo Cavaniglia is a Sydney-based artist whose large-scale installation present distant will welcome visitors into ACCA’s grand commissioning hall with bold, highly stylised lighting and a changing choreography of screens sheeted with vitreous surfaces including coloured glass and two-way mirror, to encourage reflection on the experience and perception of space.

In a kaleidoscopic and humorously existential reflection on the absurd chaos of contemporary life in the information age, Sydney-based artist Matthew Griffin’s four new video installations trade in a deliberate blurring of fact and fiction, and high and low tech. Working with real and digital sleight of hand, Griffin’s digital collages merge internet memes with global politics and personal narrative to address subjects from “deepfake” and internet regulation, to DIY body modification.

Melbourne-based artist and composer Daniel Jenatsch’s interest in documentary, fiction and historiography informs a new two-channel video and sound composition, The Sheraton Hotel Incident. In a satirical examination of security, intelligence, state apparatus and the law, Jenatsch has spliced together news reports and witness testimonies from the bungled Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) training operation of the same name, with tropes of espionage film and music genres, to explore the production of real life events in which form follows fiction.

The Macfarlane Commissions
The Macfarlane Commissions are a major initiative of The Macfarlane Fund, a new philanthropic initiative established in 2017 to honour the life of respected Melbourne businessman Donald (Don) Macfarlane. Every-second year for a period of six years, five Australian and international artists will be invited to make new large-scale works to be presented as a keynote project in ACCA’s exhibition program.

ACCA
A leading producer of contemporary visual art in Australia, ACCA is a centre for the artistic and wider communities to participate in a critically engaged contemporary art culture.