The Truth About Fiction / Group exhibition / The Gypsum Gallery / 2018

Curated by Aleya Hamza.

Group show with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Bryony Dunne, Mahmoud Khaled, Basim Magdy, Mona Marzouk, Galila Nawar and Setareh Shahbazi.

The Truth about Fiction, is a group exhibition of photographs, films and paintings that explores how the image acts as a receptacle for personal and political knowledge. The show delves into forms of informational exchange at official, informal and subliminal levels. The works draw on references from visual sources that are old and new: snapshots taken on trips, newspaper clippings of criminal cases, surveillance footage released online, museum displays and historic family crests. The artists handle their material using strategies like repetition, juxtaposition, layering, stripping, collage and montage. Produced over the span of the last ten years, these works provoke us to reconsider what we see in relation to feelings and beliefs. Building on tropes of truth, aesthetics and image production, these specific works highlight the pliability of images and their potential to amplify and diminish fact or fiction.