“Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive. […] If at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, London, Penguin Books, 1992, p. 1.

Telling is not living; yet we rely on narrative to convey what happened. Indeed, narration is not a mere distortion, but a way of knowing: as Peter Brooks observes in his eponymous essay, raw facts gain meaning only once they are shaped into narrative. The danger lies in the seduction of the effect of truth—often more valued than truth itself—especially when history shows that to control storytelling is to control reality. And at a time when conspiracy theories and truth claims are cloaked in the aesthetics and rhetoric of evidence, Seduced by Story asks: what kind of truth can fiction contain? What forms of power does narrative enable—or resist? And finally, what are the implications for the image, so often said to ‘tell stories’—particularly photography, of which Susan Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others that it ‘has only one language and is destined potentially for all’: doesn’t it mystify more than it reveals?

The artworks brought together in this exhibition question the pacts of belief that narratives propose, as well as the mechanisms through which regimes of fiction shape perception and interpretation, both on personal and collective levels, and influence how we connect to reality.