The Assault of Illusion

The Santa Mònica arts centre in Barcelona presents an exhibition on art, illusion, deception, and power. Featuring around twenty local and international artists, it offers a critical journey through various artistic techniques that have shaped our desire and our sense of reality. In the era of deepfakes and artificial intelligence, can art help us uncover these mechanisms of manipulation?

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 starts based on a suspicion: that the intention of what we call culture is, above all, illusion. Throughout history, the arts have been perfecting increasingly subtle techniques so that this illusion be relentlessly embedded in our depths. This exhibition proposes a journey from the naïve illusion to which art subjects us to the critical emancipation implied by understanding the mechanisms that produce it. 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 in a post-truth era.

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.

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. 

In a present marked by deepfakes, the mass circulation of images, artificial intelligence and the increasing sophistication of visual manipulation mechanisms, The Assault of Illusion raises an urgent question: what role can art play in helping us expose these deceptions?

Credits

Artists: A.A.Murakami (Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves), Alain Josseau, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Anish Kapoor, Antonio Gagliano and Verónica Lahitte, Berndnaut Smilde, Chico Amaral, Fabian Knecht, Ilê Sartuzi, Juan Antonio Cerezuela, Julia Santa Olalla, Klaus Frahm, Leandro Erlich, Lucrecia Dalt, MANS O and Joan Sandoval, Manuel Calderón, Miquel Màrtir, Núria Güell, Víctor Enrich, Xesca Salvà.

Curation: Enric Puig Punyet
Exhibition design: Estrella Benito and Samantha Fung
Exhibition design advice: Dovi Vargas
Technical advice: Francesc Isern
Architectonical advice: Yaiza Ares
Assistant exhibiton coordination: Laura Cantero
Advisory support in the curatorial research and scenography of the cabinet of devices: Albert Chamorro
Graphic image: Mònica Molins

Organized by: Santa Mònica and Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid
With the support of Banco Sabadell Foundation, Pascualin Estructures