John Smith
Unreliable Narrator
September 13, 2025
Since 1972, the British artist and filmmaker John Smith has made over sixty films, videos, and installations which interrogate the language of the moving image. Screened around the world at festivals, independent cinemas, galleries, and museums as well as broadcast on television, his works subvert putative divisions between documentary and fiction, between abstraction and representation, and between the personal and the political. He is an artist who creates films at the intersection of conceptual art, structural film, and documentary film. (Jeannette Pacher)
John Smith: "The use of the term 'unreliable narrator' has become very common in recent years, but ever since 1976, when I made The Girl Chewing Gum, I've always been an unreliable narrator. I don't want people to trust me. I don't want them to think I'm lying to them, but I don't want them to 100 percent trust me, either. I want to generate uncertainty, where viewers question what they are being told instead of just consuming it and ask themselves 'I wonder if that was really true.'"
The short film programs accompany the exhibition John Smith, on view at the Secession from September 12 to November 16, 2025.
With John Smith in attendance
In collaboration with Secession
Since 1972, the British artist and filmmaker John Smith has made over sixty films, videos, and installations which interrogate the language of the moving image. Screened around the world at festivals, independent cinemas, galleries, and museums as well as broadcast on television, his works subvert putative divisions between documentary and fiction, between abstraction and representation, and between the personal and the political. He is an artist who creates films at the intersection of conceptual art, structural film, and documentary film. (Jeannette Pacher)
John Smith: "The use of the term 'unreliable narrator' has become very common in recent years, but ever since 1976, when I made The Girl Chewing Gum, I've always been an unreliable narrator. I don't want people to trust me. I don't want them to think I'm lying to them, but I don't want them to 100 percent trust me, either. I want to generate uncertainty, where viewers question what they are being told instead of just consuming it and ask themselves 'I wonder if that was really true.'"
The short film programs accompany the exhibition John Smith, on view at the Secession from September 12 to November 16, 2025.
With John Smith in attendance
In collaboration with Secession
For each series, films are listed in screening order.