Secrets and Lies

Description

Free and open to all, but please register via the link on this page 

Convener

Dr Christos Lynteris (Senior Research Associate, CRASSH)

Curator

Sam Barzilay (Co-founder and Creative Director, United Photo Industries)

The result of collaboration between CRASSH and the United Photo Industries (New York), Secrets and Lies is a juried-competition based photographic exhibition held at the Alison Richard Building from 3 February to 14 March 2014.

As Europe and America are engulfed in the greatest crisis of mutual trust since WWII, as a result of the recent inter-spying revelations, secrets and lies seem to be assuming an ever more crucial character in public life. The era of “CCTV in every corner” already seems like an age of lost innocence when we now habitually email and web search in the knowledge that we are being constantly spied upon. And yet, at the same time, ordinary citizens are becoming for the first time equipped with the tool of the spy trade themselves: iphones with imperceptible cameras penetrate every corner of social life, with every private moment potentially already being part of the public sphere.

In this world of vertical and horizontal, covert and yet overt mutual surveillance the question of 'if the walls could talk' assumes a new, perplexing dimension. For it is in this context of hyper-visibility that conspiracy theories seem to thrive the most, enjoying mass audiences as well as sophisticated apologists at the core of democracies fashioning themselves as immune to such irrationalities. Under their rubric, every revelation appears as a cover-up, and every disclosure as the disguised fostering of a secret.

The exhibition opening will take place on Thursday, 6 February 2014 with a wine reception. In September 2014, this exhibition will also be shown at the Photoville festival, Brooklyn in September 2014