The Assault of Illusion

The Assault of Illusion presents a reading of art as a tool for producing illusions and deceptions and explores how this, throughout its history, has progressively shaped both our desire and what we understand as "reality”.

The exhibition addresses concepts such as post-truth, power dynamics and the mechanisms that hide behind the hegemonic creation of fictions and illusions. In short, it addresses the techniques behind art's capacity to generate forms of deception that end up influencing the way we perceive the world.

The exploration of these concepts takes place through a journey in which the audience itself is introduced to the sophistication and opacity of artistic techniques of deception that hide complex power relations. This journey accompanies critical reflection on how the arts have historically played an important role in the creation of these techniques, and raises the thesis of whether today, in a world of deep fakes and artificial intelligence/creation, the role of art should not be precisely to unveil these techniques built over the centuries.

Tour

To make the journey it proposes as a visit a reality, The Assault of Illusion offers a dynamic scenographic tour – with mirrors, veils and movable walls featuring various contributions by artists – that will lead the public to constantly enter and exit the illusion created by the art pieces themselves.

The tour is a constant transition of modes of representation and the overlapping of expectations that this can provoke in the audience: a painting provokes a different effect of reality than a photograph, a video or an installation, and the exhibition constantly plays with how one transitions from one effect of reality to another, through the overlapping of formats.

To achieve this transitioning effect, of overlapping points of view and discursive layers, the exhibition is structured in four parts along the route: 

1. The space of illusion, a place where the laws of space are not at the service of reason but of seduction, a place governed by the will to manipulate the point of view. 

2. The space of revelation, which projects the disarticulation and technical unveiling of the first space. This revelation, however, is naive, since we all know from the time we leave childhood that all illusion is artefact.

3. The space of questioning, where artists rebel against the effects and act as exorcists of the machine, wondering what the role of these technologies of illusion is in our time.

4. The space of recapitulation, which presents a genealogy of how art, throughout its history, has produced this back-and-forth of veils and unveilings, similar to what the public has been subjected to after this journey.