The ROBIN™ Currency is honoured to be featured in the exhibition SHOW ME THE MONEY: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the present.
Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art 14 June – 30 August 2014 John Hansard Gallery with Chawton House Library: 19 September / 7 October – 22 November 2014 People’s History Museum: 11 July 2015 – 25 February 2016
Initiated with Dr Peter Knight, Manchester University, Professor Nicky Marsh, Southampton University, Dr Paul Crosthwaite, Edinburgh University, and Dr Isabella Streffen, Manchester University with NGCA.
Show Me The Money asks what does ‘the market’ look like? What does money really stand for? How can the abstractions of high finance be made visible? The exhibition charts how the financial world has been imagined in art, illustration, photography and other visual media over the last three centuries in Britain and the United States. The project asks how artists have grappled with the increasingly intangible and self-referential nature of money and finance, from the South Sea Bubble of the eighteenth century to the global financial crisis of 2008. It features works ranging from satirical eighteenth-century prints by William Hogarth and James Gillray to newly commissioned works by artists Goldin+Senneby, Cornford & Cross, Immo Klink, Simon Roberts, and James O Jenkins, as well as the first UK exhibition of international artists such as Molly Crabapple. The exhibition includes an array of media: paintings, prints, photographs, videos, artefacts, and instruments of financial exchange both ‘real’ and imagined. Indeed the exhibition also charts the development of an array of financial visualisations, including stock tickers and charts, newspaper illustrations, bank adverts, and electronic trading systems.
Show Me The Money demonstrates that the visual culture of finance has not merely reflected prevailing attitudes to money and banking, but has been crucial in forging – and at times critiquing – the very idea of ‘the market’. The exhibition tours three distinct regions of the country, beginning at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, close to the HQ of Northern Rock, where in an English context the financial crisis of 2008 began. It is then shown across two sites simultaneously: John Hansard Gallery, part of Southampton University, and Chawton House Library in Hampshire, which was owned by Jane Austen’s brother, himself implicated in a financial scandal of the 1810s. In 2015 the show continues to the People’s History Museum in Manchester, a national museum that houses material history from the union and co-operative movements.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated 164pp book, published by Manchester University Press and edited by Peter Knight, Nicky Marsh and Paul Crosthwaite. The publication provides a wider set of contexts – professional, intellectual, political, literary and artistic – that inform the exhibition. The authors examine the history and politics of representations of finance through five essays by academic experts and curators alongside five commissioned contributions by notable public commentators on finance and art. The writers include Andy Haldane, the Executive Director of Financial Stability at the Bank of England, who asks us “What do you think about when you think about a ‘market’?”
Contributors:
Paul Crosthwaite is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His publications include Trauma, Postmodernism, and the Aftermath of World War II, and, as editor, Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative: Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk. He is currently working on a book entitled Speculative Investments: Finance, Feeling, and Representation in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Justin Fox is the author of The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street, 2009. He is a former columnist at Time magazine, and is currently editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group. Andy Haldane is Executive Director of Financial Stability at the Bank of England, and is one of the most prominent public voices on the current economic crisis. Peter Knight is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Conspiracy Culture and The Kennedy Assassination, and is currently completing Reading the Market: Genres of Financial Capitalism in Late Nineteenth-Century America. Ben Lewis is an art critic and documentary maker, whose works have appeared in The Independent and on the BBC. Bill Maurer is a cultural anthropologist at University of California, Irvine who conducts research on law, property, money and finance. He is Director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. Nicky Marsh works at the University of Southampton. Her publications include Money, Speculation and Finance in Contemporary British Fiction and A Reader in Literature and Globalization. She is currently completing a monograph on the history of the dollar, entitled The Empire without Credit: Money and Meaning in Twentieth Century America. Alex Preston, a former City banker, is a journalist and is the author of This Bleeding City, 2010, a novel about the 2008 banking crisis. Alistair Robinson is the Director of the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland, and has curated influential exhibitions such as Rank: Picturing the Social Order, 1516-2009. Isabella Streffen is an artist who recently completed doctoral research into military visioning technologies and their use in fine art practice. She works across media to examine and respond to fundamental problems of politics, perception, technology and narrative.
PDF available immediately; hardback press copies from 14 May 2014. Please email ngca@sunderland.gov.uk Publication Price: £20.00, hardback, 164pp.
At www.imageoffinance.com, the website for the exhibition, an interactive game in the style of a newspaper beauty contest, is modelled on JM Keynes famous description of how the stock market operates and an app called “Show Me the Money” is free to download from Apple App Store.
John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ. Open Tues-Fri 11:00-5:00; Saturday 11:00-4:00 W John Hansard Gallery E info@hansardgallery.org.uk T 023 8059 2158
Chawton House Library, Chawton, Alton, Hampshire, GU34 1SJ. Open 10:00-5:00 daily. W Chawton House Library E info@chawton.net T 01420 541010
People’s History Museum, Left Bank, Spinningfields, Manchester, M3 3ER. Open daily 10:00- 5:00 W People’s History Museum E exhibitions@phm.org.uk T 0161 838 9190
