Deceitful Moon
FEATURED ARTISTS: TOM DALE, WILLIAM HOGARTH, MATTHEW DAY JACKSON & DAVID TOMPKINS, GRANT MORRISON & CAMERON STEWART, ALEKSANDRA MIR, AMALIA PICA, SAM PORRITT, KAREN RUSSO, JOHANNES VOGL, KEITH WILSON, CAREY YOUNG
21 July – 31 August 2009
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
London, SE1 8XX
www.hayward.org.uk/
“Permit me,” he continued, “to recount to you briefly how certain ardent spirits, starting on imaginary journeys, have penetrated the secrets of our satellite.”- Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon (1865)
Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, Deceitful Moon is an exhibition in the Hayward Gallery Project Space that explores the moon as a site for misinformation, misrepresentation and mistrust. Touching on a long-standing tradition of hoaxes and conspiracy theories that found its first modern expression in the ‘Great Moon Hoax’ played by The New York Sun in 1835 (in which a series of newspaper articles detailed life on the moon as observed through a powerful telescope) the show, like the tarot card that bears its name, turns on obfuscation and doubt.
Deceitful Moon is, in part, a response to the current vogue for exhibitions marking the anniversary of major events in world history. But rather than commemorating Neil Armstrong’s famous ‘one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’, it pays tribute to a lingering uncertainty somewhere on the dark side of our cultural imagination as to whether human feet have ever touched the moon’s grey, inhospitable surface.
While the Apollo 11 mission was concerned with scientific verification and the glory of a nation and of a species, the works in Deceitful Moon propose speculative ‘lunar landings’ of a different sort. Satires of social and political control share space with meditations on technological absurdity, perception and misperception, and a very earthbound form of moon-gazing romanticism.
Deceitful Moon is curated by Tom Morton, Curator at the Hayward Gallery.
Opening hours for the Hayward Gallery Project Space:
10am – 6pm daily.
The Hayward Gallery Project Space
The Hayward Gallery Project Space, which opened in summer 2007, showcases both up-and-coming contemporary artists from the UK and internationally, many of whom have not shown in the UK before. Recent exhibitions have included solo presentations of the work of Cyprien Gaillard, Guido van der Werve, Tim Lee and Matthew Darbyshire.
Admission is free.
