Current In-House Exhibition

Forgers

Forgers, Fakers, and Publisher-Pirates

Curator: Linda Quirk

September 2025 to March 2026

Whether print or digital, text or image, artistic or scientific, rare or common, historic or contemporary, most of the content we encounter contains accidental mistakes–ranging from typos to factual errors to errors arising from prejudicial assumptions–and a significant proportion of it also contains deliberate misinformation resulting from various forms of forgery, fakery, and piracy. We can all become better readers and better at protecting ourselves from scammers by improving our understanding of the nature of the content before us. This exhibition introduces the work of notorious and lesser-known forgers, it reveals the various ways in which experts and authors have faked their own identities–ranging from carefully-selected pseudonyms to falsified ethnicities to fraudulent credentials–and it explores a number of shady publishing practices. We may find ourselves laughing out loud at the wide variety of weird and wacky enterprises, many of which have been reinvented for each successive generation and every new technology over centuries. Group exhibition visits on Monday afternoons will be hosted by Linda Quirk, Jeff Papineau, and Natasha D'Amours. The book/catalogue that accompanies this exhibition can be purchased in person in the Peel library (cash only, no dealers) or through University of Alberta Press.