True Stories: Scripted Realities

The new exhibition True Stories: Scripted Realities tests, exposes and expands forms of the documentary with video works that challenge representations of reality. The works use a variety of scripts and transcripts from real life or ‘true stories’.

Omer Fast’s The Casting 2007 features an interview with a US solider, and is filmed, edited and restaged by actors as a way to expose the construction of news by the media.

Kerry Tribe’s latest work There Will be ________ 2011 retraces the mystery behind the 1929 infamous crime at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. Using snippets of dialogues culled from feature films shot at the mansion, Tribe’s new script builds a plot that offers radically diverging accounts of the double killing that occurred in the mansion.

Tribe explains, “Taking as a starting point a series of serendipitous relationships between cinematic and actual history, it is ultimately the gaps in those relationships – the distance between cinematic representation and historical account – that will become the subject of this project”.

Andrea Geyer’s Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb restages the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem through edited transcripts of the trial, the writings of Hannah Arendt and a single performer that plays the six main roles of reporter, accused, prosecutor, defence, audience and judge.

An existent curatorial text by a prominent curator is staged in a television soap opera style by a group of noted artists, curators and critics in A Guiding Light 2010. The new collaborative work of Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle reveals the performative role and dialogic critical processes common in contemporary curatorial practice.

True Stories: Scripted Realities curator Mercedes Vicente says documentary traditions in contemporary art have recently been reinvented and reinvigorated by merging with other forms such as video art, performance and conceptual art.

“These represent an attempt to search for new forms and methods of representing and constructing reality while still engaging with social and political contents, and looking at the gallery as a location for political action and activism,” Vicente says.
 

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