I don't know whether to laugh or cry

Humour has long been used as a strategy to challenge, confront, engage or mock. It's highly ambiguous nature makes it a uniquely pliable medium for exploring the issues of our time.

Yet the things that strike us as funny are intensely personal. What is humorous to one person may not be funny to another. Humour may be culturally specific, tied to a shared experience, employed as a cathartic device or a coping strategy to deal with trauma or the absurdity of everyday life. It may also reveal truths about ourselves. Our first reaction to someone else's slip and fall may be to laugh, but this knee-jerk reaction may later invoke shame over our own self-acknowledged lack of empathy.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry includes work by Bas Jan Ader; Iain BAXTER; David Blatherwick; Michel de Broin; Wyn Geleynse; Adrian Göllner; Rodney Graham; Ken Lum; Sandra Meigs; Yoshua Okón and Peter Rose & Jesse Jane Parker. Each injects a healthy dose of humour into their work. Light-hearted jokes, slap-stick, satire and dark humour are employed throughout the exhibition in an attempt to critic, understand, change or reflect the world around us.

Curator: Melanie Townsend

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