Discover Your Aboriginality™

Exhibition statement for The Fraud Complex:
At a time when self-help books compel us to accept and express ‘our true selves,’ The Fraud Complex showcases the ways in which eleven artists approach the polar binary of authentic/fake, as it plays out in everyday life.

Incorporating performance, painting, photography, video, sculpture and installation, The Fraud Complex invites audiences into a system of suspended categories. Objects of uncertain provenance co-mingle with artworks, inciting suspicions of duplicity and feelings of doubt. While contemporary art has a complicated relationship with fakes, facsimiles and impersonations, the question of authenticity has relevance beyond the white cube, penetrating everyday debate around gender, ethnicity, morality and science. What constitutes a fraud? Is authenticity an achievable or relevant ideal? And are we all just ‘faking it’ in different ways?

The Fraud Complex is curated by emerging curatorial duo, Johnson+Thwaites. Their collaborative practice is guided by a shared interest in intersectional art practices and radical political theory. They have previously worked on projects for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, The Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, The Lock Up Cultural Centre, Newcastle and This Is Not Art, Newcastle.

EXHIBITION HISTORY
2016 The Fraud Complex, West Space, Melbourne
2016 MCA Art Bar: Flashblacks to the future