Highlighting uncertainty and contradiction, Truth or Dare emphasizes the importance of questioning both knowledge and belief by featuring artists that utilize illusion to entice, entertain, and explore the slippery terrain between fact and fiction, presence and absence, and reality and imagination. The suspension of disbelief is invoked in works that simulate games, maps, and tricks of the eye and hand—not to deceive, but to engage and connect. Today, cartography is a relic, replaced with global positioning systems that describe geography through virtual, screen-based information that appears and disappears in a keystroke. If maps have outlived their original use, what truth might they still tell? In contemporary art, maps, along with books and other printed texts, remain potent sources of inspiration for exploring the intersections of knowledge and fantasy, and of experience and imagination.

Facing continuing global strife, political instability, and economic disparity, the artworks featured in Truth or Dare speak truth to power through unconventional, often playful juxtapositions of imagery and materials, asking viewers to look and think—and question—twice. At a time when alternate facts equate to misrepresentations of truth, the alternate fictions of art may speak more honest, deeper truths. The alternative reality of the 21st-century artist’s imaginative universe may offer the ideal arena in which to confront the present and envision the future.

Featured Artists: Slater Bradley, Nick Brandt, Sebastiaan Bremer, Alain Declercq, Adonis Flores, Anthony Goicolea, Luis Gonzalez Palma, Ann Hamilton, Miler Lagos, Yousseff Nabil, Paolo Ventura, Federico Somi

Also on view –  Spotlight: LaToya Ruby Frazier

Acclaimed Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari combines the roles of image-maker, archivist, curator, filmmaker, and critical theorist to explore the performative role photography plays in fashioning identity. As one of a handful of young artists who emerged from fifteen years of civil war and a short-lived era of experimentation in Lebanon’s television industry, his work demonstrates an enduring appreciation for amateur, journalistic, and commercial photographic practices. Zaatari is also a co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF), an organization established in Beirut to preserve, study, and exhibit photographs from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora from the 19th-century to today. Within this endeavor Zaatari discovered the photographs of Hashem El Madani (1928–2017), who recorded the lives of everyday individuals inside and outside his humble Saida studio in the late 1940s and 1950s. These photos are deceptively factual in appearance, sliding between demure documentation and revealing displays of subconscious desire that exceed the capacity of the lens.

In an interdisciplinary practice that thereby positions lens-based media as both specimen and subterfuge, Zaatari participates in the discourse against photography and its complex archival legacy. For this exhibition he positions the seemingly simple fold as a narrative form, a reorganization, an enduring obfuscation, and the memory of material. In his words, “a photograph captures space and folds it into a flat image, turning parts of a scene against others, covering them entirely. Every photograph hides parts to reveal others… What a photograph missed and that was present at the time of exposure will remain inaccessible. In those folds lies a history, many histories.” The work on display will attempt to uncover and imagine these stories, undertaking a provocative archaeology that peers into the fissures, scratches, erosion, and that which archives previously shed. Surveying the fertile interstices, Zaatari explains, “Unfolding is undoing, deconstructing, turning material back to its initial form.”

Download the Akram Zaatari: The Fold – Space, time and the image Gallery Guide as a PDF.

Painters often draw from 
existing visual materials, such as photographs and reproductions of past works of art, to inspire and construct their work. Swedish artist Mamma Andersson (born 1962)—known for her dreamlike, faintly narrative compositions inspired by Nordic painting, folk art, newspaper photographs, and cinema—is no exception.

But Andersson takes this process a step or two further, importing images of stacks of books and stray photographs, clipped from various sources, directly into her painted compositions. With careful observation, Andersson’s dreamy landscapes and interiors (often combined) slowly come to reveal common imagery and accumulated biblio-ephemera filtered through, and sharing space with, the artist’s muted palette, melancholic scenery, and textural paint. Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks focuses on this aspect of Andersson’s painting practice, exploring how her use of appropriated imagery and collaged elements charges her paintings with an eerie, uncanny sense of familiarity while indulging in wholehearted fantasy and suggestive narrative.

Karin Mamma Andersson was born in 1962 in Luleå, Sweden. She studied at the Royal College of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where she continues to live and work. Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany; the Aspen Art Museum; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In 2003, she represented the Nordic Pavilion in the 50th Venice Biennale. In addition to Memory Banks, she is the 2018 recipient of the Guerlain Drawing Prize, Paris, and a participant in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo.

Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks (Damiani) is published on the occasion of the FotoFocus Biennial 2018 and Andersson’s exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.

Download the Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks Gallery Guide as a PDF.

Paris to New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott explores the encounter between American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) and French photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) during the 1920s—an encounter that would have profound and lasting effects on the careers and legacies of both artists. Berenice Abbott and Eugène Atget met in Man Ray’s Paris studio in the early 1920s. Atget, then in his sixties, was obsessively recording the streets, gardens, and courtyards of the 19^th-century city—“Old Paris”—as it was undergoing modernization. Abbott acquired much of Atget’s work after his death and was a tireless advocate for its value. In 1929, she relocated to New York and emulated Atget in her systematic documentation of that city, culminating in her epic photographic series Changing New York.

Abbott paid further tribute to Atget by publishing and exhibiting his work in the United States, and by printing hundreds of images from his negatives, using the gelatin silver process. Through Abbott’s efforts, Atget became known to an audience of photographers and writers who found diverse inspiration in his photographs. Abbott herself is remembered as one of the most independent, determined, and respected photographers of the 20^th-century, and is celebrated in particular for her photographs of 1930s New York.

This exhibition and publication bring together for the first time selections from two enormous bodies of work—Atget’s Old Paris and Abbott’s Changing New York—and explore the legacy and artistic influence between two great photographers and their obsession with documenting the transformations of two of the world’s great modern cities.

Old Paris and Changing New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott (Yale University Press) is published on the occasion of the FotoFocus Biennial 2018 and the exhibition at the Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati.

Out of the Stacks explores how photographs and images are organized and the exceptional narratives and histories that they impart. Using the Lloyd’s collection, artists conducted research and utilized photographs and photographic materials to create new art books. The Lloyd Library and Museum’s collection provided inspiration for the Cincinnati Book Arts Society artists to conceptualize new artistic designs and formats—to exercise artistic freedom to form collages, montages, and sculptures using photographic mediums and resources. Out of the Stacks examines how photo archives are specific to the modern period in human history, and how the proliferation of photography has become a significant reference point to modern art in all mediums.

The Lloyd Library and Museum has a long history of utilizing photographs in the scientific study of mycology through the work of one of its founders, Curtis Gates Lloyd. Photography became an essential tool in his quest to document mycological specimens for scientific study. Lloyd’s pioneering scientific photography forms the majority of the National Fungus Collection held by the United States Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. The Lloyd Library is an independent research library devoted to bringing science, art, and history to life serving as an inspiration to scientists, historians, and artists.

Also on view: A Year on the Edge: A photographic narrative of the Edge of Appalachia Preserve
The Lloyd Library partnered with two photographers, TJ Vissing and Rick Conner, to fill their gallery with nature photographs that focus on the Edge of Appalachia preserve in Adams County.

No Two Alike: Karl Blossfeldt, Francis Bruguière, Thomas Ruff restages the 1929 exhibition of plant photographs by the German sculptor Karl Blossfeldt (1865—1932) and photographs of cut-paper abstractions and multiple exposures by the American photographer, then living in London, Francis Bruguière (1879—1945). The exhibition, held at the Warren Gallery in London, celebrated the launch of their two books Art Forms in Nature and Beyond This Point. A surprising pair, Blossfeldt and Bruguière intrigued critics as being “quite different from the usual run of photographic shows.” No Two Alike reunites these two important modernist photographers for the first time since the legendary exhibition and juxtaposes their work with the Photograms and Negatives series by the German contemporary artist, Thomas Ruff (b. 1958), whose interest in and reaction to the history of photography has formed the background for many of his series. Ruff appropriates six of Blossfeldt’s plant motifs in his Negatives series. By comparing the work of these three photographers, emphasis is placed on a common interest in the variant, which Walter Benjamin once described as the creative principle behind Blossfeldt’s close-ups of plants. Bruguière, too, was working through infinite variations in his photographic abstractions. Like his historic counterparts, Ruff has always worked in series and variants, and in this instance presents variations of themes originally explored by Blossfeldt and Bruguière. The encounter of these three artists makes the similarities and subtle differences within their own bodies of work visible, but it also presents each of the three artists’ oeuvre as a variation of the other.

This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Ann and Jürgen Wilde Foundation, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.

No Two Alike: Karl Blossfeldt, Francis Bruguière, Thomas Ruff (Verlag für moderne Kunst) is published on the occasion of the FotoFocus Biennial 2018 and the exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.

Download the No Two Alike: Karl Blossfeldt, Francis Bruguière, Thomas Ruff Gallery Guide as a PDF.

Raquel André is a collector of rare things. 

In Lisbon, Ponta Delgada, Rio de Janeiro, Loulé, Minde, Paredes de Coura, Sever do Vouga, Ovar, Manaus, and Barreiro, she has collected content from close to 150 encounters. People of all nationalities, genders, and ages have accepted the invitation to meet her at someone’s flat for an hour to construct a fictional intimacy to be captured in memory and photographs. The photographs and details of these encounters are the contents of a performance that tells a story about what this collection of relationships may mean. Just what are we looking for when we meet someone? In the age of e-mail, Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, and Grinder, we have all become experts at faking intimacy. We post what we eat, who we kiss, where we go, what we’re thinking and reading, what we like and dislike—all translated into views, likes, and comments.

 Raquel’s collection is the results of an obsessive fascination with the terabytes of information that exist in each minuscule movement of another person. It is a reflection on intimacy that is explored one-to-one and amplified for the stage, all real and all fake. Each time the door opens for a new lover, Raquel André dives into an abyss that is the other, and reality and fiction merge. Each encounter is real. The flirtation is real. The intimacy may feel more real than fiction. And Raquel, the obsessive collector, holds on to the moments of each meeting, the rare objects of her peculiar collection, ephemeral and infinite.

Collection of Lovers first premiered in 2015 at the studio theater of the D.Maria II National Theater in Lisbon (Portugal) in co-production with TEMPO Arts Festival in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).