Conspiracy Week opens at The Photographers’ Gallery

The Photographers’ Gallery in London has commenced Conspiracy Week, a series of events “exploring the changing complexities of conspiracy theories, the myriad ways these ideas evolve, and their political significance”.

The programme includes a new digital commission by artist Joey Holder, called Selachimorpha. It takes a sequence from the film Jaws as a means to look at the ways in which manipulated images are appropriated and circulated by Internet culture as ‘fact’.

Also part of the programme of events is Divisive Moments, an exhibition of UFO photography, documents, books and tape-recordings curated by UK-based writer and publisher Gordon McDonald. This show draws on the extensive archive of the foremost UFO research pioneer, Lt. Colonel Wendelle C. Stevens, who over a 50-year career amassed one of the largest photographic collections of UFO images in the world.

The Photographers’ Gallery’s online platform will be exploring the role ‘fauxtography’ plays in shaping contemporary reality. The gallery explains: “First coined during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war to describe the blatant use of manipulated images in news articles, the term encapsulates how casual we have become in our relationship to such images and the way they are used to spread populist discourses and fan conspiracy theories.”

A full programme can be found here.