masha wysocka - Truth is Stranger than Fiction

Truth is Stranger than Fiction, 2021-2024

The project 'Truth is Stranger than Fiction' delves into the themes of truth, lies, and propaganda during the Cold War.

For this project, I worked with two different archival holdings at the Blinken Open Society Archives (Budapest, Hungary). The first archival holding consists of vernacular photographs from the 1980s. The Hungarian state photographic lab company, Főfotó, discarded or censored these photographs for technical or political reasons. The second archival holding is from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. It is a series of 'field reports' on Kafkaesque everyday life from the 1950s. They were collected through interviews with people from or who had access to communist Hungary.

The research phase of this project was supported through a Visegrad scholarship. I examined 10.000 photographs from the Private Photo and Film Foundation and 3500 'field reports' from the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute.

'Truth is Stranger than Fiction' also exists in the format of the artist's book. With its circular structure and non-linear narrative, the book offers an experimental reading experience. Two key features characterise the book: 'surrealist' texts that vividly depict the harshness of daily life at the dawn of Hungarian communism, and colour photographs that serve as a prelude to its sunset.

Through arrhythmia, I seek to break the reading cadence to question the illustrative function that we assign to the photograph and highlight the ambiguity of the fictitious relationship between image and text.

The dummy book 'Truth is Stranger than Fiction' (2021 version) was shortlisted for the VI Fiebre Dummy Book Award (Spain) and selected among 50 Belgian photobooks for the Rencontres d'Arles Festival 2022. A 2024 version of the book was nominated for the Star Dummy Book Award (Photographic Social Vision Foundation, Spain)

The project was selected for the Landskrona Foto Residency Bursary—PHMuseum 2023 Photography Grant and shortlisted for the Un(fund) Grant (the Netherlands).

The project 'Truth is Stranger than Fiction' was part of the group show 'Talent Latent' at the Scan Tarragona Festival 2022 and was shown at the Circulation(s) Festival 2024. This year, it has been part of the Les Boutographies Festival.

Circulation(s) Festival, Paris, 2024