Artists produce alternate visions and (sur)realities that entertain and challenge audience perception. CUT2010 explores these parallel universes through the fictions and tilted perspectives of the photographic lens. The authenticity of photography as a conveyor of truth has been distorted and empowered throughout its evolution from daguerreotype to film and digital. Experimentation within the medium continues to enable artists the opportunities needed to create ambitious technical illusions as well as compose staged tableau and capture uncanny moments from the everyday. Exploring dichotomies such as fairy tale and nightmare, dystopia and utopia, the exhibition reveals grandiose fantasies and skewed realities that entertain our perceptions of what is real and what is imagined.

The exhibition takes as its starting point the notion that photography is a mechanism for imagination, adventure and escape through its technique and subjects. Like theatre and film, it has the potential to immediately animate and provoke our senses, encouraging powerful and complex emotional responses. These new worlds of possibility explore the hopes, dreams, insights and observations of their creators to become amplified spectacles of shock, desire, delight, sadness, humour and enlightenment. With seemingly limitless visual inspiration and ongoing technical advances photography as a medium, constantly pushes the boundaries of visual sensation and understanding.

CUT2010: PARALLEL UNIVERSE, provides numerous entry and exit points into the ideas presented by each artist. In its entirety, these imaginary worlds within worlds, presents personal and public consideration of ongoing questions surrounding the evolution of cultural and gender identity, sub cultures, religion, landscape and the urban environment. Combining elements of nobility and farce, pathos and critique super heroes laugh at body builders, online gamers jeer at religious utopias, architecture becomes a ghostly stage and mysterious scientific expeditions shy away from erotic dolls and unforgettable human characters. These existential obsessions, hallucinations and ambiguities of both photographer and their subjects are revealed for audiences to recognise and question. What seems familiar can become alien and disturbing, playful and fantastical. The unfamiliar suddenly resonates with universal truth.

Now in its third instalment, CUT: New Photography from Southeast Asia continues to establish itself as a dedicated platform for photography. It aims to contribute fresh thoughts on the status of the medium in the region as well as the aesthetic and academic impetus of the diverse subjects being explored by individual practitioners in photography today.