Archives for January 2023
Ivar Kreuger
‘The Match King’ and ‘The Kreuger Crash’ 2022 Vintage Swedish Monopoly board and pieces, matches, custom-made stamp 2022 dimensions variable
Ivar Kreuger built a financial empire in the 1920s monopolising the production of matches wherever he could around the world. For a time this made him one of the richest men in the world, allowing him to lend money to different countries before it all came crashing down in the 1930s. By the time he committed suicide in 1932, he had acquired the reputation of both a financial genius and swindler.
This work was made during an IASPIS residency in Stockholm, Sweden in the summer of 2022.
A Fool with an Ox is No Longer a Fool
A Fool with an Ox is No Longer a Fool 2022 Relief print with Silkscreen onto Zimbabwean currency (81 x Z$25 billion agro-cheques) 67 x 126 cm (Published by South Atlantic Press)
4,358,055 is a number that can also be read as a word, in this case: YES BOSS (435 8055). The deferential phrase ‘yes boss’ or its Afrikaans equivalent ‘ja baas’ can still be heard in Zimbabwe and South Africa being said by black people in response to white people. This is a hangover from the master – servant dynamic of years of racial discrimination. Money has always been boss.
How the west was lost
How the west was lost 2022 Hand-woven archival ink-jet prints 165.4 x 89.9 cm
1 RMB made out of the entire text from The Communist Manifesto.
The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels is one of the world’s most influential political documents. It looks analytically at the class struggle and at capitalism. It does not however predict the future forms that communism would take.
The current form of communism practiced in China has evolved since Mao’s time. It now has what is called a socialist market economy (Socialism with Chinese Characteristics) and it embraces many forms of capitalism.
China has also been the world’s fastest growing economy for some time and it looks as if it could be on its way to take over from the US as the world’s dominant superpower.
photo by © Max Pescio
