The Power of Doubt_exhibition

Fundación ICO (Calle Zorrilla, Madrid) sponsors the show created by Hou Hanru, which brings together over 50 recently made works from 16 artists coming from China and Western Europe. The Power of Doubt superposes site-specific installations and works in various new and old media, and somehow rooted in photography as a model of perception.

The exhibition, sponsored and organized by Fundación ICO and PHotoEspaña, begins with the idea that the art and artists of today, like the world itself, are globalized. Through digital media – from fixed and moving images to the Internet – these artists explore the nature of reality, of truth and of dreams, generating suspense and doubt in their work more so than conclusions. The idea at the core of the exposition is even more apparent in places experiencing intense social transformations, above all in those societies that are obligated to move toward a globalized world that is open and free, which, in turn, imposes, often in a violent fashion, fictions of happiness and peace that flatten reality.

The works in The Power of Doubt express the necessary role of doubt in seeing, remembering, and communicating with the real world, as it oscillates once more between spectacular truths and dramatized fictions. Their authors, from China and Eastern Europe – places that have experienced drastic changes from communism to capitalism – and Southeast Asia and Africa – which must reckon with postcolonial memories and geopolitical conflicts – affirm the doubts and the collective desires of their societies, at the same time that they embark on broad artistic and intellectual inquiries of their own.

Further information: www.phe.es

Featured above: "National Day", from the Super Tower photographic series by Chinese artist Du Zhenjun, 2010