● Artists: Ani Mkrchyan, Cred Roy, HSU Ting (徐婷), Irene Pouliassi, Karen Tronel& Julien Szantaruk, Lora Nikolaeva, LU Wei-Chung(盧惟中)
● Curator: SHIH Ya Tien
● Design & Photo: HSU Ting
● Date: 2020.02.08-2020.02.23 13:00 – 18:00
● Venue: Treasure Hill Artist Village – Cinema Rosso
● Oline Publication: https://reurl.cc/58AK57
● Hsu Ting, Right: Another Room & Left :Under Xiaoyouken Bridge -1 (series), 2019
In our everyday life, we have been exposed to a lot of external information from social media, news, and gossip in forms of words, sounds, and visual images. In social psychology, “The Illusion of Truth” effect refers to our tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure. It reveals that due to ignorance, misunderstanding, or intentional trolling from vested interests, the fact of the information is sometimes difficult to verify. The formed cognitive bias then becomes the difference between “What we think we know” and “What we actually know.”
Based on the concept, the project The Illusion of Truth aims to experiment the intertwined relation between the curator, artists and audience in the fields of public media, social harm and illusionary space. Pitching the topic of public media, artist Lora Nikolaeva collocated moving images from online media platforms and beauty masks as her base materials. Her practices created provocative questions with regards to gender and aesthetic stereotypes in advertising, consumer beauty products, and social media participation. Artist Cred Roy’s DateMe is in the form of a dating app – Ginder. He transformed the profiles into digital portraits, intending to deduce the absurdity of modern aesthetics between real and unreal. Besides, Lu Wei-Chung‘s work The Misanthrope Island publication is reprinted from digital painting to her public IG account and then to the publication. Through juxtaposing between the medium, she wants to show her inner projection of the future and also to start a conversation with the public.
The second part of the show focuses on the concept of social harm. Currently based in London, Irene Pouliassi exhibits two installations: Getting Gracefully Shot Still Hurts and Love Bites. She arranged dramatic conflicts between her materials – guns and teddy bear’s fur, shoes and teeth – in order to present the contradictory relationship between her personal experience and national politics, trauma and intimacy. Next to the installations, video work Only Child, Dead Parents made by Ani Mkrchyan is inspired from her childhood experience when living in north England. She self-directed and performed a character whom kids would shout ‘nonce’ at while it never explicitly shows proof of these allegations. On the other hand, artists Karen Tronel and Julien Szantaruk’s collaboration Man on the Moon is a multi-layered take on a combination of well-known conspiracy theories, with a humorous and satirical twist. In order to connect the two venue spaces and to show the ever- changing daylight, Taiwanese artist Hsu Ting presents her site-specific photographical installations, Another Room and Under Xiaoyouken Bridge -1, creating an immersive minimal visual.
To stir things up and to put them back in order, information is always changing and repeated. Because it is ever-flowing and ever-changing, the apparent unshakable cognitive bias can be reshaped. The illusion of Truth project builds up a playful but also serious interactive mechanism that represents the process of forming a subjective cognition and, at the same time, invite the public to join in the process. To develop the “truth” in a collective and fluid way, therefore, we may finally realize that, we all have the freedom to speak out to establish the facts, take sides, and shape the meaning of the world.
● Lora Nikolaeva, Untitled (series), 2019
● Roy Cedric, Date me, 2020
● Right: Hsu Ting, Under Xiaoyouken Bridge -1 (series), 2019
● Left: Ani Mkrchyan, Only Child, Dead Parents, 2018
● Karen Tronel & Julien Szantaruk, Man on the Moon, 2020
● Lu Wei-Chung, The Misanthrope Island, 2019
● Irene Pouliassi, Getting Gracefully Shot Still Hurts, 2019