Authenticity and Values of the Undesirable

Join us on 7 February at 15.00 when we open the exhibition Authenticity and Values of the Undesirable with Associate Professor Chris Thurlbourne.

Authenticity, the quality of being genuine or real, has long been a contentious subject for cultural preservers, cultural critics, designers and laypersons alike. But what are our specific roles as designers in making informed decisions concerning what is authentic and, therefore, deserves to be preserved?

Authenticity is tied to notions that are authorized, trustworthy, reliable, genuine, original, factual, and real. But do we focus our attention primarily only on (aesthetically) pleasing material objects, sites, narratives, places, and/or landscapes that we ask current generations to care for, protect, and revere so that they might be passed to future generations for their education and so that we can associate our own identity with the past?

In the exhibition, Chris Thurlbourne questions how we value authenticity and how we measure the past in pursuit of authenticity. He asks how we identify the genuine, the factual, and the real.

How far back in time do we need to go to ascertain the original? How do we decide what is true and what is genuine?

On this journey of uncovering authenticity and the choices we make in that pursuit, Chris suggests that we should guard our freedom to choose objects that might be considered ugly, unsavoury or unworthy of preservation because they don’t fit into our values of aesthetics. Objects that might have been ignored, disposed of or excluded from official narratives, perhaps because they embody the ‘ugly’ material and unsavoury social and environmental costs of society’s development. Stuff that is undesirable, unwanted – often physical elements in our societies that we prefer removed, and at best, seldom accounted for.

This exhibition comments on the need to realign our understanding of what is authentic and embrace the undesirable and unwanted to confront our wastelands of existence.