The exhibition Inventing the Truth. On Fiction and Reality

The exhibition Inventing the Truth. On Fiction and Reality reflects on the possibilities of fiction as an instrument for understanding the world and for shaping the present. Blurring the line between fiction and reality allows us to articulate creative hypotheses about both past and present, thus activating a new relation between what is and what could be.

The artists' works highlight both the process of interpretation and the intricacies of producing a story. The visual construction of each project uses the conventions of fiction, even while developing around a documentary core, with an eye to revealing the subtle “sutures” which bind the actual to the imagined. The impossibility to identify where reality ends and where the story starts compels the viewer to vacillate between how convincing and how jarring the staging is.

Carmen Dobre-Hametner's photographic project approaches the extreme experience of discovering history as real life by means of reenactment.

Ștefan Sava proposes a video essay on the potential of, and limits to, interpreting a personal photographic archive, questioning the representation of a traumatic past. Larisa Sitar's project speaks about exchanges between ideology and history and proposes a new vision of the “garden of disorder”, by appropriating differently dated engravings that depict violence, ruin and anonymous characters who influenced the course of humanity. Michele Bressan uses the temporal misplacement of an event, rendering it more abstract and suspending it outside chronological conventions. Lea Rasovszky puts together a story from fragments of real events, personal memories and excerpts from books, integrating fiction into the narrator's life. Alex Mirutziu uses the concepts of “bureaucratic object” and “ontological design” in the relations he establishes between word and space, body and object.

Project selected in the competition organized by the Ministry of Culture for representing Romania at the 56th edition of the International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia.

Artists: 

Michele Bressan; Carmen Dobre-Hametner; Alex Mirutziu; Lea Rasovsky; Ștefan Sava; Larisa Sitar

Curator: Diana Marincu

Project management, production and communication: 

Ephemair Association

Organizer: Institutul Cultural Român

Commissioner: Monica Morariu

Deputy Commissioner: Alexandru Damian

Graphic design: Eugen Coșorean, Larisa Sitar

Site design: Radu Leșevschi

Partners: The National Museum of Contemporary Art (Bucharest); Center Of Excellence In Image Study (CESI) part of The University of Bucharest ; Faculty Of Letters of The University of Bucharest; The Embassy of Romania in the Republic of Lithuania; Sabot Gallery; Ivan Gallery; Fabrik; X Design Services.

Organizers: Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Romanian Cultural Institute Bucharest, Instituto Romeno di Cultura e Ricerca Umanistica di Venezia, Romanian Ministry of Culture.

9 May – 22 November 2015 / The New Gallery of the Romanian Institute for Culture and Research in Humanities in Venice