Searing documentary photographs of a war-ravaged country exposed as elaborately staged fakes. Irreplaceable Neolithic urns, dipped in bright, industrial paint that obscures their ancient markings. Vintage models and films from an early 20th-century theme park on Coney Island, revealed as an elaborate fiction. These and other works of art, which blur notions of reality and truth, are the subjects of a new exhibition organized by Elizabeth Armstrong, contemporary art curator and director of the Center for Alternative Museum Practice (CAMP) at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA).

Presented in collaboration with SITE Santa Fe, More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness takes satirist Stephen Colbert’s coined term, “truthiness”—fabricated truths, without regard to fact or logic—as its starting point to explore the unstable relationship between fact and fiction in the 21st century. Unprecedented technological change and global social upheaval over the past 100 years have caused a dramatic shift in our collective perception and experience of reality. Once agreed-upon beliefs, or “truths,” have been cast into doubt.

Through the eyes of a global gathering of 21st-century artists, the exhibition More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness, opening March 21 in Target Galleries, asks questions such as:
In a world where new technologies can radically reshape the original experience being depicted,

how do we define what is real?
How do we navigate between truthiness and deception in everyday life?
When can fiction be truthful?

The More Real? exhibition presents 60 works by 28 international artists, including: Ai Weiwei, Seung Woo Back, Zoe Beloff, Cao Fei, Thomas Demand, Mark Dion, Leandro Erlich, Omer Fast, John Gerrard, Johan Grimonprez, Iris Häussler, Jonn Herschend, Pierre Huyghe, Bertrand Lavier, Joel Lederer, Sharon Lockhart, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Eva and Franco Mattes, Jonathan Monk, Vik Muniz, An-My Lê, Trevor Paglen, Walid Raad, Dario Robleto, Eve Sussman, Mary Temple, and Yes Men.

In their work for the exhibition, these artists strike a chord between the playful, the enigmatic, and the deadly serious. At a time when the relationship between fact and fiction has never been murkier, they explore a shifting sense of what is—or is not—real, and ponder the consequences of not understanding the difference.

Courtesy of Minneapolis Institute of Arts