BOSI Contemporary is pleased to present, No Greater Fiction, a photography based group exhibition featuring the works of Peter Baker, Felix R. Cid, Sarah Muehlbauer, Yorgos Prinos, Manal Abu- Shaheen, Hrvoje Slovenc, and Mónika Sziládi. While disparate in their approaches and processes, what links this group of artists is a shared sense that what passes for everyday public activity in our current society is more bizarre, baffling, and incomprehensible than our imaginations are capable of contriving.

If there is no greater fiction than the real, why do we still insist on making sense of our lives by taking and looking at photographs that are fictions in and of themselves? The seven New Yorkbased artists in this exhibition explore the multiple realities of contemporary life through pictures that blur the dichotomy of real and unreal, analog and digital. Whether they explore staged encounters or random intimacies among objects and bodies, they create fictions we recognize from the urban spaces and suburban interiors of the early 21st century city. Asking old questions about the joint fictions of reality and the photographic medium in ways that take us beyond the documentary and the poetical, No Greater Fiction pictures the often dystopian experiences, shifting scales and topographies of the real by reminding us that being aware of make-believes does not obliterate our need to have them.

What propels each of these artists is a recognition that visual intelligence can be made communicable when one transforms the so-called real world into photographic works of art, another world altogether. For them it is a given that photographs are inherently manipulations, yet the degrees to which they investigate this notion varies. This awareness, combined with new digital possibilities, allows them to work freely and shed the scant labels once bestowed on photographers working out in the real world, as it were. They are not concerned merely with genre, but rather, view the world itself as a medium in which uncoordinated facts unfold erratically, often pressing against each other in strange and telling ways. While their subjects and aesthetic differ, this is the field where their energies and curiosities are focused. There is no greater fiction than reality itself. For it is our habitual conceptions of reality, which photography now more than ever, calls into question.

Peter Baker (b. 1981, New York City, USA) is an artist and writer from The Bronx. He studied Literature & Photography at SUNY Purchase, where he graduated in 2005. In 2009, he had his first solo exhibition My Lost City: Photographs at Kris Graves Projects in Brooklyn. In 2012, he earned an MFA from the Yale University School of Art and was awarded the Richard Benson Prize for Excellence in Photography. In 2013, he participated in the Bronx Museum of the Arts 2nd AIM Biennial. He has designed and taught courses at the International Center of Photography and has been a Visiting Artist at SUNY Purchase and Bard College at Simon’s Rock. He is a contributing writer for American Suburb X and lives and works in New York City.

Felix R. Cid (b. Madrid, Spain) started working as a photographer in Ibiza and during the winters he studied Photography in Madrid. In 2002 he moved to New York and in 2004 he started a full time program in the International Center of Photography and graduated in 2005. After several international exhibitions, he was accepted into the MFA program in photography at Yale University where he graduated in May 2012. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Sarah Muehlbauer (b. New York City, USA) received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2010, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2012. She currently works and resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Hrvoje Slovenc (b. Croatia) is a photographer based in New York. He holds an MFA in Photography from Yale University School of Art. His photographs have been exhibited in dozens of shows nationally and internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Museum of New Art in Detroit, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Croatia, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, Croatia, and Young Artists' Biennial in Bucharest, Romania. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb, Croatia.

Manal Abu-Shaheen (b. Beirut) is a Lebanese American photographer. She moved from Lebanon to New York in 2000 and received a BA degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 2003. In 2011 she received an MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art. Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions in and around New York, including shows at Nicole Klagsbrun Project and Camera Club of New York. She is a faculty member at the School of the International Center of Photography and Pennsylvania College of Art and Design.

Mónika Sziládi (b. Budapest, Hungary) holds an MFA in Photography from Yale (2010). She is currently at LMCC's 2014–2015 Workspace Residency program. She was a 2013 resident at the La Napoule Art Foundation in France, a 2012-2013 resident at Smack Mellon, and in 2008 she received the Gesso Foundation Fellowship to attend Skowhegan. She is a winner of The Philadelphia Museum of Art Photography Competition (2010), a recipient of the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship (2010), a Juror’s Pick by Julie Saul and Alec Soth, Work-in-Progress Prize, of the Daylight/CDS Photo Awards (2010), and the recipient of Humble Arts' Fall 2012 New Photography Grant. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe, and it is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She lives and works in New York.

Yorgos Prinos (b. Athens, Greece) received an MFA from the Yale University School of Art with a scholarship from Yale University in 2011. He is co-founder of the non-profit organization Αrt/Ιf/Αct and co-curator of the Depression Era Project. His work has been presented in various venues and publications in Europe, the United States, and Asia and his photographs are in private and public collections. He lives and works in New York.