Two Moons and Two Suns is an exhibition proposed by the Fictive Archive Investigations - a collaborative multidisciplinary, international project and working group, led by artist Claire Ducène. Twelve artists from a wide range of disciplines offer a labyrinth of possibilities for the island archive and its fiction.

The archive (understood here as a repository of information relating to one or more individuals, an organisation or location) contributes to the construction of what we perceive as truth. It attests to a palpable past: its position is concrete, unassailable, authoritative. However, the archive’s selectivity alone betrays its inherent subjectivity. The processes of retaining, accumulating, sorting, acquiring, and cataloguing include absences, losses and destructions, as well as biases and assumptions, rendering the archive inherently incomplete, and always open-ended.

Archiving alters its subject: cataloguing displaces the object in favour of information, a process furthered by digitisation, which renders the physical object anachronistic, relegated to physical and economic fragility and irrelevance.

Interpretation and research, stemming from selected and subjectively mediated collections, inevitably extend narratives. The archive is thus inherently fictive.

For a historian, the archive may help to construct a historical truth; and for an artist, the archive can become a mine for creative research. Archived items may be used to challenge accepted truths, to create narrative and fiction, allowing the distinction between truth and fiction to become blurred. Documents can be altered, forged, placed and replaced; these fictive documents may support a fictitious reality, which allows artists to question our realities and imagine other possibilities.

The exhibition title Two Moons and Two Suns (Deux Lunes et Deux Soleils), evokes the duality of the gaze, and the uncanny state of the fictive archive. Although it has been possible to photograph the sight of two suns, known as «parhelion», this extremely rare phenomenon is often believed to exist only as a mirage channeled through a literary imagination and fictional tales.