More Real?
Art in the Age of Truthiness
SITE Santa Fe
July 8, 2012–January 6, 2013
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
March 3–June 9, 2013
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Gala opening weekend: July 6–8
Featuring exhibition previews, parties, an artist panel, and More Real? sight-seeing tours of Santa Fe.
www.sitesantafe.org
www.artsmia.org
Searing documentary photographs of a war-ravaged country exposed as elaborately staged fakes. Irreplaceable Neolithic urns, treated as ready-mades, dipped in cheerily bright, industrial paint that obscures their ancient markings. These and other works of art, which blur notions of reality and truth, are the subject of a new exhibition organized by Elizabeth Armstrong, Contemporary Art Curator and Director of the Center for Alternative Museum Practice (CAMP) at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA). More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness takes Stephen Colbert’s coined term “truthiness”—fabricated truths, without regard to fact or logic—as its starting point to explore the unstable relationship between fact and fiction in the 21st century.
Opening on July 8, 2012, at SITE Santa Fe, the exhibition will present 60 works by more than 25 recognized and emerging international artists, including: Ai Weiwei, Seung Woo Back, Zoe Beloff, Cao Fei, Thomas Demand, Mark Dion, Leandro Erlich, Omer Fast, John Gerrard, Johan Grimonprez, Iris Häussler, Jonn Herschend, Pierre Huyghe, Joel Lederer, Sharon Lockhart, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Eva and Franco Mattes, Jonathan Monk, Vik Muniz, An-My Lê, Trevor Paglen, Walid Raad, Dario Robleto, Eve Sussman|Rufus Corporation, Mary Temple, and the Yes Men. In addition, More Real? features an architectural intervention by Greg Lynn/FORM.
Organized in three thematic sections—Deception and Play: From Trompe l’oeil to the Authentic Fake; The Status of Fact: Unreliable Narrators, Parafiction, and Truthiness; and Reshaping the Real: Cinema, Memory, and the Virtual—the exhibition presents work across a variety of traditional and experimental mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, video, sound, and online installations.
The works in the exhibition put pressure on contemporary notions of authenticity, veracity, historicism, and originality. In doing so, they create a sense of discomfort that asks viewers to examine more deeply the often-felt impulse to accept presented facts and images at face value.
The exhibition is accompanied by several publications including a fully-illustrated 300-page catalogue, co-published by DelMonico Books/Prestel, and a newly commissioned More Real? Guide to Santa Fe, newly commissioned by SITE.
More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness is presented by SITE Santa Fe and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The exhibition is organized by Elizabeth Armstrong, Curator of Contemporary Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The exhibition is made possible by generous support of the MIA from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Contemporary Art Affinity Group; and Étants donnés, the French-American Fund for Contemporary Art.
Significant support for SITE’s presentation of More Real? is provided by a National Endowment of the Arts’ Art Works Grant, Jeanne & Michael Klein, and numerous other generous donors.
About SITE Santa Fe
SITE Santa Fe is a dynamic platform for the production and presentation of artistic and curatorial innovation. Located in the Historic Railyard, SITE serves as a nexus for contemporary art discourse through excellence in its exhibitions and programs.
About the Minneapolis Institute of Arts
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA), home to one of the finest encyclopedic art collections in the country, houses more than 80,000 works of art representing 5000 years of world history.
Press Contact:
Anne Wrinkle
T 505 989 1199 x 22 / wrinkle [at] sitesantefe.org
SITE Santa Fe
1606 Paseo de Peralta
Santa Fe, NM 87501
*Image above:
Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG, Catt (Fake Cattelan sculpture), 2010. taxidermy cat and bird, polyurethane resin, cage, wood. Private collection, Houston, courtesy Inman Gallery, Houston. Photograph by Rinaldo Capra.
