In "Margins of Excess" the notion of how personal imagination conflicts with generally accepted beliefs is expressed through the narratives of six individuals. Every one of them momentarily received nationwide attention in the US press because of their attempts to realize a dream or passion, but were presented as frauds or deceivers by the mass media’s apparent incapacity to deal with idiosyncratic versions of reality. This book weaves together their stories through personal interviews, press articles, archival footage and staged photographs.

Herman Rosenblat became well-known because of a self-invented love-story set in a concentration camp during WWII, the private detective Jay J. Armes appears to be a real-life superhero, Darius McCollum drew media attention by compulsively hijacking trains, Richard Heene would have staged an elaborate television hoax, Rachel Doležal would have pretended to be Black, and Ali Shallal al-Qaisi an Iraqi civilian who was tortured by the CIA at Abu Ghraib prison, and claimed to be the subject of its most infamous photo, a claim which the New York Times repeated and then retracted. Despite the verifiable incarceration which al-Qaisi endured, this fact-checking error is what stuck as al-Qaisi was denounced. His story adds a poignant layer to our understanding of truth and perception—he was a "hooded man" from Abu Ghraib, just not the one the paper had claimed him to be. In Pinckers’ portrait, the photo is faintly visible over al-Qaisi’s shoulder; the sitter looks past the lens with a faint smile, a blue splint cradling his mutilated left hand.

While focusing on six main subjects, Pinckers also sprinkles in some poetic and symbolically charged objects in elusive compositions. The other two works in the exhibition belong to this category and are open to ideas present in the works of Fast and Van der Auwera’s contributions.

Courtesy of the artist & Gallery Sofie Van de Velde