Trust Is The Ultimate Currency seeks to consider the importance of the news, questioning why fake news and alternative facts have become throwaway catchphrases, overwhelming and frightening to the mainstream media whilst enabling small groups and organisations to spark outrage and anger by manipulating imagery and falsifying realities. The exhibition brings together works critiquing, commenting and reflecting upon the rise of the media circus, documenting the decline in the relevance and reliability of the news and wondering whether citizen journalism is a worthy replacement.
Trust Is The Ultimate Currency is an accompaniment to the sixth issue of the isthisit? book, which launched at SPACE’s Art+Technology programme on the 31st January, looking at fake news, alternative facts and the rise of clickbait.
isthisit? is a platform for contemporary art, exhibiting over 700 artists since its creation in May 2016, founded by its current director, artist and curator Bob Bicknell-Knight. Online, it operates as a gallery producing monthly exhibitions showcasing emerging to mid-career artists, hosting a roster of guest curators experimenting with the medium of the internet to interrogate a variety of concepts. The website also hosts monthly residencies, where artists are given a web page to create new work that exists on the internet as a piece of net art. Offline, it has held exhibitions nationally and internationally and is the publisher of isthisit?, a book series released on a triannual basis.
