Tate Modern

Since its birth, cinema has made a paradoxical demand on its viewers: to consciously suspend their disbelief. This remains a preoccupation for contemporary artists who have grown up exposed to an intense flow of still and moving images. The film and video works in this exhibition focus on the tension between image, narrative and the viewer’s perception. Together they expose the fracture between what we are shown on screen and what we see. Borrowing from various cinematic conventions, as well as formats including lecture, documentary, rehearsal and found footage, they examine the limits of our imagination and credulity. With a variety of approaches, their references move between the black boxes of movie theatres and the ‘black mirrors’ of our TV screens, computers and smart phones.

The exhibition blurs the boundary between depiction and deception and questions the logic of storytelling. Does the illusive charm of the moving image undermine its authority as a visual record? And what role does the viewer’s imagination play in constructing a narrative?

Artists: Herman Asselberghs, Manon de Boer, Sherif El-Azma, Patricia Esquivias, Lars Laumann, Maha Maamoun, Ján Mančuška

Curated by Kasia Redzisz and Aleya Hamza

This exhibition is collaboration between Tate Modern, London and Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo.

The curatorial exchange is supported by the DC MS World Collections Programme with the collaboration of Gasworks.