fALSEfAKES – VRAIFAUXSEMBLANTS

fALSEfAKES-VRAIFAUXSEMBLANTS is a continuation of the CPG's programme planning over the past twelve years, concerned with presenting contemporary artistic positions that are likely to extend into the present the term that Walker Evans used at the end of his life to describe his own approach: "documentary style." This programme has been constructed in the awareness that style is less a question of stylistics than ethics, i.e. a way of keeping its subject at a distance, of including the out-of-frame as a dynamic produced by the viewer, of thinking not only about the production of images, but also about their distribution, and how they cohabit with other sources of images. These 80 exhibitions have also led towards other fields of investigation closely or remotely associated with the documentary style, whether it be "archivism" or "visual studies." But perhaps "documentary style" reached its zenith in the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher and the early works of their students—like Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth or Thomas Ruff, to cite only those three—which themselves embody not only the greatness, but also the decadence of that style.

Between the time when they began their work in the late 1980s and today in 2013, the mainly Western elites have profoundly changed the world and the world of images, with the year 2001 as the accelerator for paranoid policies. Lies have come to be justified by the national interest, and catastrophism has become the new religion, promulgated by the mass media. What Guy Debord put forward as a horror scenario in the '60s and '70s and Jean Baudrillard prophesied and summed up in the '80s has taken a turn that neither of the two thinkers—though we are speaking of the most clear-minded that have been known in the second half of the 20th century—could have predicted.

Well before the digitalisation of photographs which started slowly in the '90s, artists had begun to subvert the notion of "document," a term that has clung to photography since it became such a fantastic instrument for the advance and popularisation of science, above all—but not exclusively—biology, in the 19th century, supported by positivism. That "belief" in its documentary strength was radically challenged by artists such as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall from the end of the '70s.

As long as the false fake document remained in the symbolic domain, in the field of art, there was nothing to fear. But as photography is an extremely porous medium, capable of eating into categories and hierarchies, it infiltrated (collapsing) museums too with images of current affairs, science, etc. This has resulted in news items and social affairs, for example, being dealt with today by the most interesting photographers in this field with the aim of making their documentary recording veer towards fiction, while the world constructed and shaped by women and men increasingly resembles the déjà-vu, and consequently our points reference are ever more corrupted.

It is from the starting point of such ideas that fALSEfAKES-VRAIFAUXSEMBLANTS attempts not to explain this chaotic world, but to be a chaos in itself, leaving the viewer bereft—initially—of any reference point, but offering through this guide the chance to at least zero in on the violence of the clashes of the fixed and moving images exhibited, coming from the widest variety of sources.

Joerg Bader Curator of fALSEfAKES - VRAIFAUXSEMBLANTS Director of the Centre de la photographie Genève

fALSEfAKES – VRAIFAUXSEMBLANTS

artists:
Vlado Alonso, Ariane Arlotti, Eric Baudelaire, Hippolyte Bayard, Emmanuelle Bayart, Valerie Belin, Beltracchi , Mathieu Bernard-Reymond, Mohamed Bourouissa, Fernando Brito, Matthias Bruggmann, Victor Burgin, Asger Carlsen, Julien Chatelin, Vincent Debanne, diezelle , Stan Douglas, Philippe Dudouit, George Dupin, Philippe Durand, Pierre de Fenoyl, Harald Fernagu, Vincent Fournier, Michel François, Serge Fruehauf, Agnes Geoffray, Regis Golay, Paul Graham, G.R.A.M. , Lourdes Grobet, Nadja Groux, Beate Gütschow, Anne Hardy, Benjamin Hugard, Guillaume Janot, Shai Kremer, Angele Laissue, Miguel Leache, Sebastien Leseigneur, Jerome Leuba, Sherrie Levine, Nicolas Lieber & Virginie Otth, Sylvere Lotringer, Patrice Loubon, Christian Lutz, Mirko Martin, Mass , Bjørn Melhus, Olivier Menanteau, Enrique Metinides, Gian Paolo Minelli, Francis Morandini, Gianni Motti, Uriel Orlow, Marco Poloni, Aurelie Petrel, Sheng Qi, Koka Ramishvili, Jean Revillard, Reynold Reynolds, Andrea Robbins / Max Becher, Juliette Russbach, Gilles Saussier, Christian Schwager, Bruno Serralongue, Cindy Sherman, Björn Siebert, Sebastian Skira, Jules Spinatsch, Clare Strand, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sabine Tholen, Peter Tillessen, Catrine Val, Gilles Verneret, Jeff Wall, Martin Widmer, Akram Zaatari

curators:
Joerg Bader, Sebastien Leseigneur