Pablo Bronstein, Duncan Campbell, Phil Collins, Luke Fowler, Ryan Gander, Roger Hiorns, Simon Martin, The Otolith Group, Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer, Margaret Salmon, Mark Aerial Waller, Cathy Wilkes

You have not been honest is a major new touring exhibition of contemporary British film and video, curated by Colin Ledwith and Polly Staple, which will have its world premiere at Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples on 24 May. The show features an innovative generation of British artists using documentary and narrative film structures to new ends. A strong proportion of the works draw the viewer into a personal and subjective space, mixing influences from cinema, home movies, news-media and archive footage. These films range in subject matter from immersive intimate portraits in domestic settings to seemingly objective narrative standpoints which blur the distinction between the truth as presented through the camera, and actual reality.

‘You have not been honest’ is a refrain taken from Margaret Salmon’s film P.S. (2002). This work, like all the films in this show, is both documentary and fiction. As the exhibition title it conjures the atmosphere of the show and the range of artists’ concerns. Concepts of truthfulness, honesty and deceit are all figured in these films, through narrative drive, aesthetic device and spoken word.  Several of the artists are not primarily filmmakers and bring diverse influences to their exploration of film’s and video’s ability to play with space and time, sound and moving image.

You have not been honest comprises 12 artists exhibiting across two levels of the museum and will be the largest presentation of British film and video work to be featured in Europe in recent years.

Curated by Colin Ledwith and Polly Staple

Commissioned and produced by the British Council in partnership with MADRE

Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples

24 May – 1 October 2007