Gold.
...capitalist society is founded on the conviction that in the absence of beings who suffer a man cannot enjoy to the full his possessions and his happiness…
Curzio Malaparte, The Skin. (1949)
Gold has a lure as the most precious and highest value, but also as that which can bring forth the lowest qualities of men, in the greed it feeds and the slave-like conditions of its exploitation. Gold comes with a promise of salvation from poverty. It is the ultimate freebie. Hidden in the ground, almost already perfected by nature, we see it as a gift to man lying ready for the taking. That is, if we are industrious enough to find it. Yet, “to strike gold”, has also a chance-like, ethereal, and even surreal, quality to it. It is not manufactured, but the result of millions of years of geological evolution that has created an almost pristine value. Pure Gold glitters with a set of imaginary purities – pure of purpose, pure of intent, pure in value – that help justifying its taking and the means of its taking. In times of crises, almost anything seems justified. We need capital, development and growth, and the quest for it trumps everything, even the lessons that could have been learnt from the crisis itself.
We investigation with the second installment of Gold, an exhibition project that explores the symbolic values, economic and human consequences that surrounds this precious metal. The first versions were presented at Art Athina in 2015 and 2016as well as the Swedish culture magazine Ord och Bild.. It focused on the ways that Gold can pretend to present a crisis solution in American popular media suggesting that anyone can go to Alaska to dig up the free riches of the ground, whereas in reality gold mining in many countries in the developing world is a dirty business laying waste human life and natural environments, as well as local and global economies. At Supermarket 2017 we continue the investigation and invite international and Swedish artists Oscar Lara (Peru/Swe), Klitsa Antoniou (Cy), Gioulla Hadzigeorgiou (Cy/Gr) and the Museum of forgetting (Sw) a.o. in an exhibition with original works continuing the development of a perspective on how art can reflect on these issues of global economical importance.