Rien que la vérité — Kadist, Paris — Point de vue — Slash Paris

Nothing but the Truth — Rien que la vérité @ KADIST from April 5 to July 12. Learn more A disruption of genre, a disturbance in the gene of our histories, allowing the exhibition to fracture the truth, to double its reach, to question it without diminishing it, to duplicate it without flattening it. Just as for Jacques Derrida there is no “outside the text,” everything—perception and imagination alike—produces an effect that carries a truth. Nothing but the truth, then, because there is nothing else but the truth. And everything in this exhibition—dream, lie, fabrication—is taken at its word; nothing escapes the stories it tells, and it is precisely by digging into these fictions that a sharper form of reality is reached.

In this sense, the voices of the chosen media contribute to the message; the prominence of video and moving images seems to respond to a logic of flow, mobile temporality, and fragmented narrative. In Bahar Noorizadeh’s work, speculative fiction around Elon Musk (Teslaism) becomes, by borrowing the structure of many video games, a narrative palimpsest where techno-capitalism, electronic music, and dystopian futurology collide. Noorizadeh offers not so much a frontal critique as a reconfiguration of perspective and its critical power, through a multilayered fiction that mimics the strangeness of the real and entangles it in the vapor of a dream we cannot quite tell who is dreaming.

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc works through suturing: he fabricates from scratch a memory that never existed while crafting a very real emotion and thought. His reconstruction of a fictitious historical moment shifts the horizon of expectation and questions the very nature of history and narrative, ultimately confronting it with the one who tells it. A speculative archaeology, no doubt, but one that remains committed, exposing the political dimension of storytelling and testimony in their troubled relation to truth—unless it is our own truth being examined.

Ghita Skali, for her part, plays on the edge of absurdity. Using iconic elements from a given culture—tulips, cheeses, herrings—she spins a thread into a derailed fiction where normality unravels and slips into delirium. It is a mechanism of diversion in which the viewer is continually confronted with a form of voyeurism that plunges them into the heart of an intimate identity questioning its own boundaries—and the boundaries of its culture.

By blending gravity with playfulness, intellectual rigor with freedom of tone, and formal invention, Nothing but the Truth multiplies perspectives, decentralized narratives, and unfinished hypotheses. It is a thinking that doubts, that trembles, that gropes forward—yet bears witness to tangible facts, trapped, for example, in the superb tapestry by Mercedes Azpilicueta, which offers a mapping of an event through spatial resonance. Spread across the center of the room, it blinds what lies ahead even as it carries the possibility of being neatly folded and stored away, reduced once again to the status of an object, soon to be trampled underfoot.

Like the tapestry, history in this exhibition must be unfolded and extended, deployed in reverse so as to allow its discontinuities and silences to emerge. Hence this compelling assembly of explorations of the world through its ruins, hallucinations, and shared possibilities.

what emerges is a constellation of fragmentary, shifting, and performative truths—truths that reflect those we assign to ourselves. Avoiding the trap of nihilistic relativism, these truths enrich and rearticulate a history of perception, one whose confrontation and crisis allow us to truly face the test of truth.