UIC Assistant Professor Beatte Geissler "Show Me The Money"

THE IMAGE OF FINANCE, 1700 TO THE PRESENT

NGCA: 14 June – 30 August 2014

Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art

Sunderland, UK

 

John Hansard Gallery with Chawton House Library: 

19 September / 7 October – 22 November 2014

 

People’s History Museum: 

 

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. 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. 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.

 

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. An app called “Show Me the Money” is free to

download from Apple App Store. Users can design their own

money, dress like a trader, and test their nerve in a stock market

game. It also features background facts about the world of

finance and exhibition. Scan the QR code here to download.

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’?”