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Manif d’Art 10 – The Quebec City Biennial | Illusions Are Real | Quebec City, Canada | 19 Feb - 24 April 2022 | participating artist & writer
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The 10th edition of the Manif d'art Biennial extends across a multitude of venues, spaces, and environments throughout Quebec City, each exhibition animating the core thesis, while also developing its questions and musings. Illusions Are Real meditates upon the proliferating amount of artifice that inhabits our lives today, from synthetic flavours, altered photographs, and viral conspiracies, to political rhetoric, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, deepfakes and the concocted identities we adopt online. And while the history of half-truths is nearly as long as humankind itself. the acceleration, expansion, and ubiquity of deception in the age of social media has led some to call this the "post truth" era. The Manif d'art biennial navigates this disorienting terrain from a variety of perspectives, congregating artists from around the world who captivatingly build and break illusions to consider both the seduction and danger of this growing phenomenon.
Jonathan Allen presents artifacts from his performative alter ego Tommy Angel, who pointedly marries political machinations with religious zeal in a manner all too relevant to the global rise of autocrats and extremists. Allen also speaks to the expanding economy of cryptocurrencies and their attendant mystification by curating and commissioning a series of banknotes from magicians around the world - implicitly asking who, and how, we trust today.
Steve Matijcio [curator, Manif d’Art 10 – The Quebec City Biennial]
[above: installation views at L'Oeil de Poisson gallery / public spaces around Quebec / Musee National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec for Les Illusions Sont Réelles]
Manif d’Art 10 – The Quebec City Biennial >
Tommy Angel >
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