John Smith
Unreliable Narrator
September 13, 2025
Since 1972, the British artist and filmmaker John Smith has created over sixty films, videos, and installations that interrogate the language of the moving image. His works, which have been screened around the world at festivals, in independent cinemas, galleries and museums and broadcast on television, subvert putative divisions between documentation and fiction, between abstraction and representation, and between the personal and the political. The artist creates films on the borderline between conceptual art, structural film and documentary film. 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.'" (Jeannette Pacher)
The short film programs accompany the exhibition John Smith, which can be seen at the Secession from September 12 to November 16, 2025.
Since 1972, the British artist and filmmaker John Smith has created over sixty films, videos, and installations that interrogate the language of the moving image. His works, which have been screened around the world at festivals, in independent cinemas, galleries and museums and broadcast on television, subvert putative divisions between documentation and fiction, between abstraction and representation, and between the personal and the political. The artist creates films on the borderline between conceptual art, structural film and documentary film. 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.'" (Jeannette Pacher)
The short film programs accompany the exhibition John Smith, which can be seen at the Secession from September 12 to November 16, 2025.
Link Secession