| Type: | Exhibition | | Description: | Between the Real.
For something to be 'made up' it has to have an 'other', something to which it may be compared. If someone is 'made-up' through happiness, success or pride, as the usage of the term in this city implies, a journey or occasion has led to the transition, with a starting point and an end. If someone is made-up with cosmetics, a mask on a disguise, then something must remain hidden.
Although numerous definitions, interpretations, applications and strategies of, and fon, the term may be found - narnative, fiction, myth, lies, fabrication, embellishment, constructed/ new, games/rules, acting/impersonating - whichever one you adopt, it is the tension between its two poles that is cnucial and defining: the new when companed to the old. We know, for example, that science fiction is science fiction thnough its relation to, and departure from the real, the plausible and the known. Implicit in this diffenence is the jounney from one existence to the othen. Not only does this path reveal the pnocesses and stnategies of 'making up' but it begins to question the defining assumptions that build the fabric of the polemic in each of its extremes - histony and present, fact and fiction, tnuth and lie.
The artists selected for the exhibition at Tate Liverpool share, in diverse ways, a practice that rests upon the dilemmas of such a polemic and the tension or ambivalence that arises between its opposing states. Many use strategies of appropriation and transformation to incorporate something of the 'real' - a preexisting text in the form of a photograph, a film still, a fable, a myth, a work of art history, or a building, an eyewitness account or a memory - and distort or embellish it until it becomes something new. These are all entities and phenomena that contribute to our construction of reality, yet are constructs in themselves. History, fact, documentary, cultural and personal memory, modern cliche, narrative and fantasy are unravelled, their formation and worth tested.
The works in this exhibition occupy an ambiguous place between the real and the invented. They test some of the very factors that prompt our understanding of the world and leave us unsure: what is actuality, what is fantasy, and can one exist without the other?
Laurence Sillars
| | Description Source: | Liverpool Biennial The Guide – International Festival of Contemporary Art | | Description Source Date: | 2008 |
| |
