Biografia
The Grand Insolvency Show - 300 statistics to explain one world.
Life‘s just a number between 34 in Central Africa and 84 in Japan (life expectancy). Increasingly, our lives are governed by facts and figures. Quarterly sales figures and insolvent national economies are now much more important than the most basic cultural parameters. In fact, the future of welfare states, and even entire civilizations, are more dependent on a functioning economy than on all art galleries, museums and theaters together.
Contemporary data culture has made a much more significant historical impact in recent decades, than any other form of analogue and traditional cultural development in history. Uncontrollable by any user in the world, data culture created a „virtual intelligence“. Statistics, as the central manifestation of data culture, now constitute social processes and drive numerous daily decisions, both on a micro and macro scale, that affect our futures. Statistical releases form ‘intuitive decisions’, and they force immediate attention, rating and scaling to create an illusion that we are in control of this new mass of global data. But what if we are not really in control? What if this is all just a modern form of fortune telling?
„The Grand Insolvency Show“ is a polemic exhibition which focuses on a visionary and liberal idea of visual arts - Statistics. Since Duchamp and Kosuth, concept art has not placed a clearer statement than this show. 300 slides with confronting statistics, across a range of global themes, are projected via four Kodak carousel projectors. The key focus being the exposure of current data on European society and, at it‘s core, the focus on the perceived notion of the EU as a ‘role model’ for the rest of the world.
The exhibition has been edited using publicly available data from global sources, including the OECD and Eurostat, but with the concept of turning serious statistical analysis into engaging art: The curves, columns and pie charts themselves are readymade pictures.
