If money makes the world go round, its out of control axis is addressed at a historical and global level in this urgent and expansive new group show. Drawing its title from French thinker and writer Georges Bataille, nine contributors address the idea of debt in different ways, with the spectres of war, colonialism and economic exploitation ever present.
Congolese artist Sammy Baloji reconstitutes fifty copper mortar shell casings as plant pot accessories for ideal homes. A 1948 recording of a choir becomes similarly troubling once you learn how Christian missionaries made the singers hold copper crosses in front of their hearts.
Western influences are there too in Terra Rationarium (2018), Cian Dayrit’s trinket filled wooden cases, where toys and totems point up a damning history of exploitation in Dayrit’s native Philippines. Working with marginalised communities, Dayrit’s series of tapestries map out strategies of change.
Moyra Davey’s Copperheads (1990-ongoing) is a series of blown up photographs depicting multiple images of the American Lincoln Cent. Lined on the wall like oversize stamps, the acquired wear and tear from the million pockets they have lined reveals truly dirty money. More equitable exchanges are proposed in Marwa Arsanios’s film, Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 4: Reverse Shot (2022), which looks at the possibilities of common ownership in a Lebanon ravaged by colonialism and civil war.
Anglo-German collective terrao’s proposal for an AI augmented forest is even more idealistic. For The Plot (Utopia Bloemen) (2018), Swedish based duo Goldin+Senneby bought some wasteland on top of a former coalmine in Belgium. Their artists’ box is a poetic blueprint for alternative living with its roots in a pre capitalist past.
Throughout the exhibition, several of Hana Miletic’s patched up tapestries appear as a kind of remakery, making do and reinventing its source to become something stronger.
If Hanna von Goeler’s paintings of birds on defunct bank notes say much about how pieces of paper are valued, whether as money or art, Lubaina Himid’s Naming the Money (2004) brings human value to the fore in a carnival of life size hand painted wooden figures that puts the anonymous African bit part players of European royal court paintings centre stage. Himid gives each a name, identity and sense of collective dignity in a narration that has the air of a 1970s schools TV programme explaining other cultures to curious infants. As they clutch musical instruments and other tools of their trades, Himid’s characters are liberated, free at last to make something priceless.
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 17th March-27thMay.
Scottish Art News, April 2023
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