2021-22 | The Museum of Revelatory Fakes | MoRF | TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

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The Museum of Revelatory Fakes

The Museum of Revelatory Fakes (MoRF.) In the project a series of ‘fakes' are explored, mulled over and learnt from, to see if they can transform into objects of social and creative value.

Fakes are not a new part of everyday life. But what is new, in our so-called 'post-truth' age, is the speed at which they can be created, consumed and believed. MoRF takes this predicament as a starting point to explore the use-value, impact and future of fakery through a curated selection of case studies, artworks and historical objects. MoRF asks what we can learn from the fake in public life and if there is ever an ethical justification for its use.

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WEH Oxford · The Museum of Revelatory Fakes (MoRF)

Stock image with overlayed text reading 'a model pretending to be upset'

MoRF started as an artistic and curatorial response by Al Hopwood to Patricia Kingori’s pivotal research into the fake in global health. The partnership explores a shared fascination in the impacts of misinformation from a psychological and sociological perspective.

MoRF is now moving into production for its first series of case studies, which will feature creative responses from Hopwood, archival materials, and a new series of podcasts from Kingori.

The home of the project is the MoRF website where each case study will be presented as an individual online exhibition.

Elisa Granato: 100% Alive

Dr Elisa Granato: "I'm very much alive, thank you."

When microbiologist Dr. Elisa Granato volunteered to be the first recipient of a trial vaccine for Covid-19, she didn't expect to be declared dead afterwards on social media!

In the aftermath, she spent several days trying to convince the world that she was – in fact – alive and well, and suffering no ill effects from her injection. Despite Elisa's attempts to prove her 'aliveness', she still continued to receive communications accusing her of being dead. Some even believed that all of her denials were somehow pre-recorded, as part of a conspiracy.

In response to this story we worked with Elisa to create a drawing, a film, a letter and a podcast.

Read full case study

Laura Martin: The (Fake) Fake Artist

The abstract artist Laura Martin was a pseudonym created by the psychologist David Rosenhan for an artist who was supposedly working undercover for him to expose how the 'sane' were being wrongly diagnosed as 'insane' in US psychiatric institutions in 1970. But who was Laura Martin in real life? Did she even exist?

David E.H. Jones: In Perpetual Motion

David E.H. Jones used ‘the fake’ with great effect in science communication by creating sculptures and drawings that proposed a range of speculative inventions under his fake brand DREADCO. In this case study we explore his Perpetual Motion Machine sculptures.

Rose Mackenberg: The Psychic Detective

Rose Mackenberg was a private investigator in 1920s America who was trained by the conjurer Harry Houdini to detect trickery used by fraudulent mediums.

John Howard Griffin: Black Like Me

John Howard Griffin was was a white American journalist and author from Texas who in 1959 temporarily pretended to be Black in order to reveal the appalling impact of racial segregation in the Deep South.

The Museum of Revelatory Fakes (MoRF) is a partnership between Professor Patricia Kingori (the Ethox Centre and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities) and artist Al Hopwood. Kingori is a sociologist and the PI of the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Fakes, Fabrications and Falsehoods in Global Health’ research project which explores contemporary concerns about fakes in global health and what processes are involved in discerning the ‘real’ in everyday settings. Hopwood is a visual and conceptual artist whose recent work includes the False Memory Archive and a major curatorial project, Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic at the Wellcome Collection.