This evening at 6:30 PM, join Center of the Humanities and GC Art History for hosting Fabulated Archives, a discussion featuring art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty and artists Zoe Beloff and Katarina Burin on the fictional, the parafictional, and the seemingly fictitious but true in contemporary art. (Nov 10, 2015, 6:30 pm, Room C-198, The Graduate Center, CUNY)
In a world in which “truthiness” has entered the Oxford English Dictionary, how are artists responding to the newly malleable condition of fact? Art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty has categorized the recent strategies of contemporary artists to creatively play with the conventions of storytelling and history as the parafictional. Neither pure invention nor just the facts, today artists are employing archives and historical material to produce new stories in unprecedented ways to engender skepticism, doubt, and hope on the part of the viewer. Within such works, the notion of history and the belief in truth undergoes destabilization but not obliteration.