2013/09 Liquid Assets, steirischer herbst festival, Graz, Austria

http://www.steirischerherbst.at/2013/english/calendar/calendar.php?eid=17

Things clear up in retrospect, they say. What was eclipsed by the gravity of events becomes visible later: causes, reasons, connections, culprits. But is that really so? Today, for example, five years after the outbreak of the biggest post-war financial and economic crisis, have we really learned anything? Have we understood the pathologies that can be unleashed by an alliance of democracy and market economy that we learned to see as part of the natural order and without alternative after the fall of the Wall? Have we really understood the financial turn, with all its consequences, its devastating effects for the global economy, but also for democracy and human rights, that dramatic shift from real to finance industry, in which assets, concrete and abstract alike, are created and destroyed in fractions of a second? Do we know how to get out of it again?
But then why is no end of the calamity in sight? Why don’t we even draw clear conclusions from the sheer violence that goes hand in hand with finance capitalism? And why – despite all the experts constantly explaining the world to us in talk-shows and at round-table conferences – do we seem to lack words when we try to put what is happening to us in a nutshell?
The international exhibition “Liquid Assets” focuses on these mysteries, the ineffable and the obscure, the opacities and the shady sides of an economic and financial system that no longer can explain itself. In order to explore the secrets and logics of free-flowing global cash flows with the devices of art, in order perhaps to understand a bit better how money and debt morality can define and deform interpersonal relationships.

The catalogue “Liquid Assets” (Mousse Publishing) with texts by Katerina Gregos, Luigi Fassi & Christian Marazzi and contributions by all participating artists, will be published on September 20.