Date: May 21\, 2011
Location: Witte de With\, Center for Contemporary Art\, Wi
tte de Withstraat 50\, 3012 BR Rotterdam
Opening: Saturday
21 May 2011 (6 - 9 pm)
Performance by Goldin+Senneby at 7 pm<
/p>
Film Screening: Sunday 26 June 2011 (12 – 6 pm)
The End of Money is a group exhibition about time and value. Bringing tog ether works by a host of international artists\, this exhibition and its pa rallel publication reflect upon the fears\, hopes\, and expectations associ ated with the end of money and its ominous consequence: the dissolution of an absolute standard of value.
What limits does the economy impose on our collective imagination\, and how is the collective imagination respons ible for the current economy? The End of Money focuses on the multiple rela tionships that could and those that should exist between culture and econom y. Informing this curatorial project is the utopian notion that\, in a worl d where money has been factored out of the collective memory\, other suppre ssed forms of value may emerge leading to another social bond and a differe nt relationship to time.
Time\, Benjamin Franklin famously said\, is money. In Marshall McLuhan’s formulation of this statement\, money is “stor ed time”. With this variation\, McLuhan meant to suggest that with the cloc king of labor\, a practice whose origins lie with the Industrial Revolution \, time becomes the meta-commodity\, that which is ultimately and essential ly being traded in money. The time of work\; but not necessarily – as Frank lin would have it – the time of the worker.
The works included in The End of Money range from reflections on the arbitrary ways in which value i s ascribed to things\, as in Zachary Formwalt’s video At Face Value (2008)\ , in which a stamp collection is taken as an occasion to explore the histor ical valuation of stamps as currency\; to explorations of the absolute loss of representative value\, as in Christodoulos Panayiotou’s 2008 (2008)\, a monumental pile of shredded Greek Cypriot Pounds\, the totality of which t he artist was able to acquire when Greek Cyprus adopted the Euro. Other wor ks highlight time\, which is a persistent corollary of money in our efficie ncy-obsessed culture: Maha Maamoun’s short video 2026 (2010)\, explores the limits of the temporal imagination\, revealing how the image of the future is foreclosed by the mind’s over-identification with the present\; or Tori l Johannessen’s graphs\, which quantify the relationship between time and h istory and as such attempt to de-naturalize our conceptions of it. There is also Fischli & Weiss’ Sichtbare Welt (1987-2000)\, a series of photographs taken by the artists all over the world\, critically evoking a parallel be tween systems of valuation and modes of representation.
Artists
Alexander Apóstol\; Pierre Bismuth\; Peter Fischli & David Weiss\; Zachary
Formwalt\; Goldin+Senneby\; Hadley+Maxwell\; Toril Johannessen\; Vishal Jug
deo\; Agnieszka Kurant\; Matts Leiderstam\; Maha Maamoun\; Christodoulos Pa
nayiotou\; Lili Reynaud-Dewar\; Tomás Saraceno\; Tonel\; V
angelis Vlahos\; and Lawrence Weiner.
Curated by
Juan A. Gaitán\
; assisted by Amira Gad.
Biography: Antonio (Tonel) Ferna
ndez (Havana\, Cuba\, 1958)
Lives and works in Vancouver\, Ca
nada. Solo exhibitions include Nothing to Learn\, Galeria Habana\, Havana (
2011)\; Some Information is Now Available\, Teck Gallery\, Vancouver\; Tone
l\, Miart 08\, Milan International Art Fair of Modern and Contemporary Art\
, Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery\, Milan (both 2008)\; A Music of The Body\, P
aolo Maria Deanesi Gallery\, Roveretto (2006)\; Tonel\, Gallery Paule Angli
m\, San Francisco (2002)\; Some of the Houses\, Several Documents\, the Roc
ket\, Detour 888\, San Francisco\; and Tonel: Lessons of Solitude\, Art in
General\, New York (both 2001). Selected group exhibitions include Disturbi
ng Narratives: Cuevas\, Toledo\, and Tonel\, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art\
, Texas\; The Billboard Project (Seeing Peace)\, San Francisco Internationa
l Arts Festival\, San Francisco (both 2008)\; Face to face. The Daros Colle
ctions\, Zürich\; Cuba Avant Garde: Arte Contemporáneo cubano de la Colecci
ón Farber\, Museo Harn\, Gainesville and John and Mable Ringling Museum of
Art\, Sarasota\; and Killing Time\, Exit Art\, New York (all 2007). Tonel g
raduated in Art History from The University of Havana\, Cuba in 1982. He wa
s the recipient of a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship for painting and install
ation art in 1995 and won the Cuban Artists Fund Award of the Cuban Artists
Fund in New York in 2003.
Publication
The accompanying
digital publication\, edited by Juan A. Gaitán\, includes contributions by
Dessislava Dimova\, Donatien Grau\, Dieter Roelstraete and Carolina Sanín.
They have been approached with the request to speculate on this theme in t
heir own medium – be this fiction\, art history\, philosophy or criticism –
and to form their own areas of expertise\, be these “scientific” or “unfou
nded.” Documentation of the exhibition will also be included.
Language
: English
ISBN: 978-90-73362-98-7
To be made available for free d
ownload via www.wdw.nl.<
/em>
Side-Programming
Film Screening: A selection of histori
cal and contemporary films whose subject is money and time will be screened
at Witte de With on Sunday 26 June 2011 (12 to 6 pm). This event is organi
zed by Juan A. Gaitán and Mariska Oosterloo.
Time/Bank: For the duration of The End of Money exhibition Witte de With will accept Time/ Bank’s hour-notes designed by Lawrence Weiner. Time/Bank is a project by e- flux: www.e-flux.com/time bank.
Supported by:
Office for Contemporar
y Art Norway\; Cypriot Ministry of Education & Culture\; and Pro Helvetia:
Swiss Arts Council. With thanks to the Fonds BKVB\; The Canada Council for
the Arts\; and Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart
- Berlin.
Photo: Tomás Saraceno\, Endless Big\, 2006\,
C-print\, 180 x 120 cm
Courtesy of the artist & Andersen’s Contemporar
y\, Copenhagen