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The Tallest Artist in Next Wave
(2016)

Live performance and mixed media installation presented as part of The Fraud Complex, curated by Peter H. Johnson & Denise Thwaites, West Space, Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, AU

Assorted textiles, champagne, industrial ladder, framed and signed certificate of high achievement, synthetic rope.

"Otherwise known as ‘imposter syndrome’, the fraud complex is a neurosis which plagues the individual with a deep sense of inauthenticity and inadequacy. Suffered by many, but by marginalised people disproportionately, this syndrome is symptomatic of an authoritarian dichotomy between authenticity and fraudulence that permeates contemporary life. Operating within public discourses that at once promote the assuming of our ‘authentic selves’, while recognising the multifaceted instability and fluidity of personal identity, the conceptual opposition of authentic/fake inflects and infects our thinking about perceptual, cultural, social and political fields of experience. Echoing its namesake, The Fraud Complex is a dissonant assemblage of works that seeks to suspend established categories of selfhood and knowledge. An expanded exhibition that brings eleven contemporary artists into dialogue with writers, performers and thinkers, The Fraud Complex seeks to destabilise the binary of authentic/fake. It asks questions such as ‘what does it mean to be authentic?’, and ‘are we all just faking it in different ways?’" 

 

Curatorial statement, Peter H. Johnson & Denise Thwaites: A Domain of Proliferated Doubt

Exhibition information and further documentation here 

 

Image credit: Alan Weedon

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