What is Truth?, The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts: In Event of Moon Disaster, 17 February – 4 August 2024; Liquid Gender, 17 February – 4 August 2024; Jeffrey Gibson: no simple word for time, 24 February – 4 August 2024; The Camera Never Lies: Challenging images through The Incite Project, 18 May – 20 October 2024
A major news story at the time of writing this review is of celebrities, including Piers Morgan, Nigella Lawson and Oprah Winfrey, rightly criticising the use of AI deepfake online adverts that gave the false impression they had endorsed a US influencer’s controversial self-help course. Against a backdrop of fake news, elaborate scams and the burgeoning presence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), how we can know what is true in the world around us and are we, as a result, experiencing a time when increasingly sophisticated technology can distort reality and diminish our own sense of authenticity?
These are some of the questions being explored, through a series of fascinating, interlinked exhibitions, in a 6-month investigation entitled What is Truth? at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. Following its relaunch in May 2024, the Centre has embarked on a new approach to exhibition programming, empowering art to address fundamental societal challenges. Director, Jago Cooper, believes that the radical and rule-breaking intent of this programme “chimes perfectly with the original ambition of the Sainsbury centre founders”.
When it first opened, the ‘Living Area’ space inside the Centre that displayed the Sainsbury Collection was ground-breaking. Designed as a place of visual communication, all its objects were housed at eye-level in small groups within free-standing cases to enable 360 viewing enabling people to view them closely and to appreciate them more as a result. That innovation has now led to an understanding of the artworks in the Collection as living entities and the invitation to meet them in a different way than in other museums or galleries, “much more like another person than an inanimate object”. The displays and interventions at the Centre aim to break down the barriers of how we conventionally experience a museum and allow us to form deeper and more meaningful connections with art.
These radical approaches understand art as alive and capable of engaging people with the fundamental questions of life; not only posing urgent, global questions to visitors but also helping them find answers. Cooper says: “What is Truth? is one of the most pressing questions we all face. It is increasingly urgent not only because artificial intelligence can now indiscernibly impersonate the image and voice of those we trust, but also because of the wider societal context of diminishing faith in previously trusted sources of power and information… If we can’t find truth in the information, individuals and institutions of our society, it shakes the foundation of our belief in our cultural edifice itself.”
Their exploration of these questions begins with a demonstration of how an event as influential as the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing could be manipulated, and how doubt can be cast on even the most well-known of facts. We begin on sofas in an accurate recreation of a living room from the Sixties, settling down to watch the moon landing on television as so many did at the time. In this version, however, disaster occurs and President Richard Nixon appears, through AI, to read what is an authentic but unused speech entitled ‘In Event of Moon Disaster’.
American new media artist Halsey Burgund and British digital artist Francesca Panetta have reconstructed this speech with the use of state-of-the-art deepfake technology. They say: “By using the most advanced techniques available, creating a video using both synthetic visuals and synthetic audio (a “complete deepfake”), we aim to show where this technology is heading – and what some of the key consequences might be.”
In their newspaper, created for the exhibition, which explores the issues surrounding deepfakes, they note that: ‘researchers at the forefront of AI, media, and ethics research, say that disinformation predates technology and that it has always been a fixture of information dissemination. “An old struggle for power in a new guise,” according to Deepfakes and Cheap Fakes. Whether it’s a paper article, a doctored photo, or an expensive deepfake video, it will always fall to eagle-eyed, rigorous, shoe leather journalists and seasoned experts to separate truth from lies, even as the line between the two becomes murkier.’
The below ground gallery spaces at the Centre enable the curators to fashion a trail or pilgrimage route through the exhibitions, including the addition of displays from the Collection to provide additional interest and reflection of the issues. As we progress from the opening installation along the cavernous corridor that runs along the side of the basement galleries, we encounter examples of Sixties design innovations including works by Charles Eames and Andy Warhol, and artefacts from Japan which highlight changes to understandings of truth as Shintoism encountered Buddhism and also through the Age of True Depictions in the 18th and 19th centuries. These additional displays from the Collection, which also feature as part of some of the major exhibitions, provide additional depth to the exploration of issues, in part by their demonstration of similar debates in both the recent and more distant past.
The Tank Man display in this corridor area pre-empts the slightly later, large exhibition The Camera Never Lies: Challenging images through The Incite Project (18 May – 20 October 2024). This will re-evaluate some of the most iconic images of the past 100 years using works drawn from The Incite Project, a private collection of photojournalism, documentary photography and photographic art with a remit to support contemporary practitioners. Featuring more than 80 works by photographers such as Don McCullin, Stuart Franklin and Robert Capa, the exhibition will chart a global century of documentation and manipulation, through fact and fiction. It will be an exhibition dedicated to the impact and influence photography has had on shaping – and in some cases misdirecting – the narrative of major global events.
Currently, three different images of the Tank Man in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on 4 June 1989 are displayed. These raise issues of the limitations of our knowledge, as the identity of the man in these iconic images is unknown, and of censorship, as these are iconic images outside of China but are almost unknown within.
In the third of the four major exhibitions composing the Centre’s exploration of the nature of truth, Liquid Gender offers exploration of the relationship between gender expression and identity, with a focus on pre-colonial traditions, through the work of Leilah Babirye, Martine Gutierrez, Laryssa Machada and Antônio Vital Neto Pankararu, and Rashaad Newsome,
This exhibition ranges around the globe exploring gender, identity and LGBTQIA+ communities. Babirye, who sought asylum in the US after being publicly outed in her native Uganda, depicts the many faces and identities of drag queens in a series of vibrant works on paper ‘Kuchu Ndagamuntu (Queer Identity Card)’. American artist Gutierrez showcases her ‘Demons’ series in its entirety, which depicts the artist as a deity from Aztec, Maya and Yorùbá traditions. In ‘Origem’, a series of photographic portraits overlaid with Indigenous motifs, Afro-indigenous photographer Machada and Indigenous creative Pankararu document queer Indigenous identities in the Brazilian Northeast. The result of a research project at the University of Leeds, this series draws on centuries of both visibility and oppression of queer people in Brazil. The multi-disciplinary work of New Orleans born Newsome explores black and queer space in art history.
Newsome is also making a new holographic work titled ‘In the Absence of Evidence, We Create Stories’, which will look both to the cultural traditions of the past and the possibility of the future. This is another project using objects from the Sainsbury Centre´s own collection, in this case as part of a visual dialogue with African sculptures that transform into futuristic cyborgs and speak about their past, present and future. Liquid Gender as a whole shows a mix of images from LGBTQIA+ and indigenous communities with a significant history plus those creating new stories in the present while drawing on the heritage of multiple cultures.
The final space and installation on this trail contain the first ever UK solo exhibition by Jeffrey Gibson, the first Indigenous artist to represent the USA at this year´s Venice Biennale. Gibson’s work incorporates murals, paintings, textiles and historical objects, while also weaving together text drawn from lyrics, poetry and his own writing, complete with references to abstraction, fashion and popular culture. He is of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee heritage and uses materials such as Native American beadwork and trading posts in his art, which explores identity and labels.
Gibson has created a vast installation that incorporates 19th and 20th century objects from Indigenous cultures across North America. Alongside the beadwork, parfleche and dolls that are common motifs in Gibson´s work, ‘I can choose’ considers the artist´s relationship with these items alongside how they are displayed within public facing museums. The exhibition also illuminates the rich practice of abstraction in Indigenous art, going against the common narrative within UK museums that abstraction only emerged in the 20th century.
In the book accompanying this season of exhibitions, Gibson speaks about “uncollected, undocumented narratives”, “whether individual or community-based narratives, or cultural narratives”, and says these are “leveraged towards truth”. That is so, because: “If we were presented with all the information, if we weren’t erased and things weren’t edited out, that leverages us closer to the full picture, which is what truth is, right?”
Newsome also notes the fraught nature of the presence of art objects from around the world, particularly those from Africa, in the Sainsbury Centre Collection. This is because their “historical narratives – largely written by Europeans – are deeply flawed” neglecting and obscuring “a much more interesting and deeper history”. He quotes Theodor Adorno who said “The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak” to explain his attempt in ‘In the Absence of Evidence, We Create Stories’ to imbue such objects with a voice as “a way to speak about their abduction and to use creativity and compassion to transform their suffering into forms and deeds that empower and inspire”.
The postmodern attempt to uncover hidden or erased narratives is the primary driver for this 6-month investigation, as doing so gets us closer to the full picture which is, in Gibson’s words, the truth. The existential concern within this investigation is about the extent to which fake narratives and censorship may prevent that fuller realisation of the truth from being achieved. In Newsome’s words, this is necessary as it signals “that all these images, conversations, artists, and ideas are joined because interconnectedness is the true nature of all beings”.
Jonathan Evens
The images are:
President Nixon reads out In Event of Moon Disaster speech. Still from video. © MIT and Halsey Burgund
Martine Gutierrez, Demons, Yemaya ‘Goddess of the Living Ocean,’ p94 from Indigenous Woman, 2018. © Martine Gutierrez; Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.
Jeffrey Gibson, I Can Choose, 2022 © Jeffrey Gibson. Courtesy the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Sikkema Jenkins and Co. and Roberts Projects. Photo: Max Yawney
Stuart Franklin ‘The Tank Man’ stopping the column of T59 tanks. Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China. 4 June 1989 © Stuart Franklin. Courtesy of Magnum Photos