In MANIPULATING REALITY: How Images Redefine the World on view at the CCCS – Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina – Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, from 25 September 2009 to 17 January 2010, 23 international artists will explore new ways of depicting reality with photographs and video-art which will reveal just how much, or how little, truth there is in what is seen and what is depicted.
The concept for the exhibition resulted from a CCCS project which involved Brett Rogers (director of the Photographers’ Gallery, London), Luminita Sabau (director of the DZ Bank Art Collection of contemporary photography, Frankfurt), Martino Marangoni (director of the Fondazione Marangoni, Florence) and Franziska Nori (project director, CCCS). The show will focus on the meaning of the term “reality” in the context of contemporary art as it explores the different ways of representing the world and the ambiguity that lies between the real and the verisimilar, the concrete and the apparent, the present and the past.
Various disciplines have already signalled a paradigm shift when they contend that the “real world” does not exist as an independent category, merely as a projection or a construction by the individual. Actions and beliefs are then based on this “reality”.
Photography and video art may not only record reality, they may, at the same time, falsify it. Today, with the spreading popularity of digital technology and the widespread dissemination of images through the mass media and the internet, this ambiguity has if anything increased, pushing the conflict between appearance and reality to its limits and demanding that the spectator play an active role in defining what he or she is seeing as real.
The exhibition presents the work of 23 international artists: Olivo Barbieri (Italy), Sonja Braas (Germany), Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin (South Africa), Gregory Crewdson (USA), Thomas Demand (Germany), Elena Dorfman (USA), Christiane Feser (Gremany), Andreas Gefeller (Germany), Andreas Gursky (Germany), Beate Gütschow (Germany), Tatjana Hallbaum (Germany), Ilkka Halso (Finland), Robin Hewlett & Ben Kinsley (USA), Rosemary Laing (Australia), Aernout Mik (The Netherlands), Saskia Olde Wolbers (The Netherlands), Gwon Osang (Korea), Sarah Pickering (UK), Moira Ricci (Italy), Cindy Sherman (USA), Cody Trepte (USA), Paolo Ventura (Italy) and Melanie Wiora (Germany). All use photography and video-art to manipulate our perception of the visible world and build new models of reality.
www.strozzina.org
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