SALT LAKE CITY, UT.- The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting the Main Gallery group exhibition, Ideologue.

Bringing together the works of nine international and national contemporary artists, Ideologue explores relationships of power in both the cultural and political realms, employing humor and hyperbole to address platforms of ideology.

Our globalized world's vast image culture lays the groundwork for an arena wrought with diverse and often rivaling ideologies. Through assorted representations of heritage, religion, governance, and desire, ideology appears natural and intrinsic, rather than as a byproduct of culturally manufactured belief systems. These subtle structures go on to shape, embed, and saturate such widespread societal values as individual freedom, progress, nationalism, and identity.

Ideologue seeks to appeal to and evoke these frameworks in a sometimes whimsical, sometimes subversive way. Ivan Argote and Larissa Sansour submerge the majestic into unexpected contexts: Argote through Blind Kittens (2014), an animation of three iconic lions-of Iraq, Beijing's Forbidden City, and Florence-who play with a small ball; Sansour with A Space Exodus (2009), in which the artist transposes Neil Armstrong's moon landing and Stanley Kubrick's seminal film into a Middle Eastern context. Kathryn Andrews juxtaposes the expressive faces of hobos over emblems of excess and capitalism, and Julia Wachtel incorporates a nine-year-old Syrian refugee's drawing into her fascination with the visual language of mass culture. Dan Mills intricately re-imagines and reconfigures the global future of U.S. imperialism, while Fayçal Baghriche upends our notions of collective identity by presenting 27 flags from different countries, rolled up so that they become identical.

Throughout Ideologue , the humorous and tongue-in-cheek collide with the impactful, consequential, and very real questions of our world. With text, print, video, and sculpture, these artists playfully map out how contemporary artists poke fun at the political universe and its many claims to social truth.

Participating artists: Kathryn Andrews, Ivan Argote, Fayçal Baghriche, Christoph Büchel, Jeremy Deller, Basim Magdy, Dan Mills, Larissa Sansour, Julia Wachtel