Regimes of Truth: Art, Power, and the Making of Reality

SEPTEMBER EXHIBITION

Regimes of Truth: Art, Power, and the Making of Reality

Dates: September 5 – 28

First Friday: Friday, September 5 3 5PM to 9PM

Reception & Artist Talk: Sunday, September 14 3:30PM to 5:30PM

What is the truth, and who decides? These questions lie at the heart of Regimes of Truth, an exhibition that brings together artists who examine the structures that shape our understanding of reality. Inspired by the theories of French philosopher Michel Foucault, this show explores how truth is not an absolute or neutral concept but generated through power, discourse, and institutional influence.

Foucault argued that each society produces its own “regime of truth”, a system of knowledge, norms, and authority that determines what is accepted as true and who is permitted to define it. These regimes are supported through political or legal systems and culture, language, education, and media. In this context, art is far from passive; it is a site where truth is constructed and contested.

This exhibition invites viewers to consider art not merely a reflection of society but an active force in shaping it. The artists included in Regimes of Truth work across media and methodologies to:

• Critique the dominant narratives and ideologies implanted in everyday life.
• Reveal hidden or suppressed perspectives through visual, material, or performative means.
• Engage with the institutional settings in which truth is produced, galleries, schools, histories, and archives.
• Reimagine what could be seen, said, and known in a society conditioned by invisible rules

In doing so, their work aligns with Foucault’s notion of critique, not as destruction, but as an ethical practice of making the familiar strange and the invisible visible.

At a time when contested realities and competing truths shape public discourse and personal identities, Regimes of Truth asks: What role can artists play in questioning what we take for granted? How do creative practices open space for resistance, imagination, and transformation?

This exhibition offers a collection of artworks and a provocation: to reconsider how we know what we know and what futures become possible when those truths are challenged.