Let's Do the Numbers

work exhibited in the group exhibition You Breathe Differently Under The Weight. Debt and Credit
Curated by Annette Hans at GAK (Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst)
Bremen, Germany

June 6 & September 7 2025

Excerpt from exhibition text:

The extensive social, economic, and political processes of debt are deeply ingrained in realities, histories and representations on global and local scales. Between promise, coercion, and presumed guilt, an abstract understanding of debt—despite its formative impact on people and environments— is based on a suggestive charge and impersonal measurement. In the exhibition, close readings of materials and narratives follow such prevalent notions and representations, modes of extraction, and possibilities of withdrawal.

The images and entanglements that the artists address in You Breathe Differently Under the Weight. Debt and Credit are part of an indebted existence in which the abstract operations of debt are reflected in relationships. They address the traces of human agency without, however, representing it concretely; they are inscribed in landscapes, in queer readings of (historical) narratives, as well as in their scales and measurabilities.

In this exhibition, The Treasury, a two-channel video, was exhibited alongside three drawings made with pencil and burn marks on found and sewn paper. The drawings write the titles of three songs: "We're In The Money", "Stormy Weather", and "It Doesn't Mean A Thing If It Doesn't Have That Swing". These three songs are played as background tracks on a segment of American National Public Radio (NPR)'s daily show Marketplace, where the stock market numbers are read aloud. What song is played is dependent on whether the numbers are up, down, or "swinging".

These drawings were used to make welded steel works; the burned holes are a result of the welding points. Those steel works are a part of the projects The Treasury and Pushing Up Daisies (2025).