Genuine Fakes

  • Yasha Muraben

The ‘Genuine Fakes’ series combines writing and sourced quotes with an internet assembled image archive, to explore ideas around authenticity in the internet age. Each zine focuses on a different case in which repetition, imitiation and sampling are used as a core means of production. The 4 book series was printed in A5 on a lightweight 130 GSM gloss. The bright white, glossy paper and the highly saturated, pixelated images mimic the online environment synonymous with the books’ subject matter. The prominence of the footnotes is intended to remind the reader to think about each image’s source.

Volume 1: The Mona Lisa A Version of Verisons looks at “the most parodied work of art in the world” and what effect its many iterations have on the way we observe the original.
Volume 2: American Gothic Iconoclasm to Icon follows the famous work’s transition from an iconoclastic satire of rural America, to an emblematic portrayal of the American working class. The image has been repeatedly dismantled and re-assembled in a simultaneoulsy destructive and creative process that resembles the modification strategies of remix culture.   
Volume 3: The Last Supper Lost in Translation focuses on a famous image that was restored using a copy as a reference. The zine discusses the tension that this creates around the idealised view of ‘the original’.