6:45 pm
Introductory remarks by 21c Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites
7 pm
Artist talk with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Join us in celebrating the launch of a new exhibition at 21c Chicago. Highlighting uncertainty and contradiction, the artworks featured in Truth or Dare: A Reality Show emphasize the importance of questioning both knowledge and belief by utilizing illusion to entice, entertain, and explore the terrain between fact and fiction, presence and absence, reality and imagination.
The suspension of disbelief is invoked in works that simulate games, maps, and tricks of the eye and hand — not to deceive but to engage and connect.
Featuring painting, photography, video, and site-specific installation, Truth or Dare speaks truth to power through unconventional, often playful juxtapositions of imagery and materials.
Featured artists include Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Alejandro Almanza Pereda, Trong Gia Nguyen, Siebren Versteeg, Federico Solmi, Ann Hamilton, Pedro Reyes, Leo Villareal, and Laura Letinsky, among many others.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967 and lives and works in Montréal. In 1989, he received a B.Sc. in Physical Chemistry from Concordia University in Montréal, Canada.
Lozano-Hemmer is a media artist working at the intersection of architecture and performance art. He creates platforms for public participation using technologies such as robotic lights, digital fountains, computerized surveillance, media walls, and telematic networks. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival, and animatronics, his light and shadow works are "antimonuments for alien agency."
Hemmer has exhibited his work around the globe, and he was the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition at Palazzo Van Axel in 2007. He has also shown at Biennials in Cuenca, Havana, Istanbul, Kochi, Liverpool, Melbourne NGV, Moscow, New Orleans, New York ICP, Seoul, Seville, Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, and Wuzhen.
His public art has been commissioned for the Millennium Celebrations in Mexico City (1999), the Expansion of the European Union in Dublin (2004), the Student Massacre Memorial in Tlatelolco (2008), the Vancouver Olympics (2010), the pre-opening exhibition of the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi (2015), and the activation of the Raurica Roman Theatre in Basel (2018).
Collections holding his work include MoMA and Guggenheim in New York, TATE in London, MAC and MBAM in Montreal, Jumex, and MUAC in Mexico City, DAROS in Zurich, MONA in Hobart, 21C Museum in Kanazawa, Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul, CIFO in Miami, MAG in Manchester, SFMOMA in San Francisco, ZKM in Karlsruhe, SAM in Singapore and many others.
