DUSSELDORF.- Perceptions of truth are widely mediated through moving images. While they can be used by those in authority to exert influence, this exhibition explores the ways in which time-based media can connect political ideologies with the desire to create a world of one’s own. Borrowing from various cultural narratives, the works expound on their potential to serve as an incubator for social mythologies.

Traditionally understood as narrations about gods, creation, and sanctity, myths are stories that are widely shared and factually ambiguous. They tell unverified truths, educate and entertain at the same time, and create archetypes from simple characters. JSC On View: Mythologists addresses the tensions created between facts and fictions through the production of personal as well as collective narratives. The works each grapple with various mythologies by reinterpreting histories, disrupting established behaviors, and imagining new visual and sonic worlds. What binds them together is that the limits between myth, fact, and fantasy are unclear—whether or not by the artist’s own making. Through everyday acts of pretending and performing, the works ask: What—if anything—can be trusted? How is meaning assigned to these stories? Who creates these myths and which ones will be carried into the future?

Wu Tsang’s video Wildness (2012), along with Mark Leckey’s works Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Parade (2003), examines the desire for a sense of belonging within cultural movements and subcultures. These works document particular milieus while examining the collective fantasies that drive their construction. Mike Kelley’s decade-long project, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36 (Vice Anglais) (2011), probes and subverts popular American media tropes through nightmarish performances and relationships between cultural archetypes.

Through very different mediums and contexts, the enduring projects by the Guerrilla Girls and the work of Natascha Sadr Haghighian foreground myths specific to the art world through fictionalizing their own personal narratives and participation. In Klara Lidén’s videos Paralyzed (2003) and Grounding (2018), the artist uses her own ambiguously gendered white body to challenge and confuse established codes of behavior.

Lina Lapelytė’s Hunky Bluff Act 1–6 (2015) and Jamie Crewe’s Pastoral Drama (2018) borrow from historic mythologies as well as operatic arias to examine deeply entrenched narratives and gender roles. Similarly, Mika Rottenberg’s Chasing Waterfalls. The Rise and Fall of the Amazing Seven Sutherland Sisters (2006) and WangShui’s From Its Mouth Came a River of High-End Residential Appliances (2018) use fables, commercial formats, and contemporary architecture as catalysts to open up questions around the production of identity. Laure Prouvost’s video work They Parlaient Idéale (2019), created for the French pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, established its own set of mythologies through the connection between language, image, and movement. Finally, Jacolby Satterwhite’s opulent digital tableaux present utopian science-fiction worlds that forge new relationships and hierarchies.

The third edition of JSC On View presents video and sound installations from twelve artists in the Julia Stoschek Collection, some of whom are being exhibited at JSC Düsseldorf for the first time.

JSC On View: Mythologists is curated by Rachel Vera Steinberg, fellow of the JSC Curatorial & Research Residency Program (CRRP) 2019–2020.

Some of the works in the exhibition can already be viewed online and in full here: jsc.art/mediathek

The official booklet with detailed work texts is available for download as PDF.