March #29 > April #4, 2011
Drachma – Speculation on Symbolic Value

Drachma is a research initiative, involving artists and theorists across disciplines, with an interest in the Greek economic reality and the Greek currency as a manifestation of this reality. We are investigating the Drachma as a symbol of economic value, national identity and political power, as they are expressed historically in the imagery of the currency. The iconographic and the symbolic representations of the Drachma, in the concrete syntactic context of notes and coins, provide a specific frame of reference to our analysis of Greece today. Our methodology includes archival research, art, economic theory, political design, psychoanalysis … Our production will culminate into a symposium, an exhibition, and a publication.

http://drachmaproject.tumblr.com/

Annex of the Athens School of Fine Art, Hydra, Greece

National Bank of Greece – Historical Archives

||| a Project by

Nikos Arvanitis is an artist working in Athens & Leipzig
Robin Bhattacharya is an artist working in Zürich
Juliana Borinski is an artist working in Paris
Danilo Correale is an artist working in Naples & Antwerpen
Jack Henrie Fisher is a designer & writer working in Berlin & New York
Assaf Gruber is an artist working in Tel Aviv & Paris
Yota Ioannidou is an artist working in Athens
Matteo Lucchetti is a curator working in Milan & Antwerpen
Mo Y is an architectural research laboratory working in Athens
Giorgos Papadopoulos is an economist & philosopher working in Athens
Liv Strand is an artist working in Stockholm
Amelie Rydqvist is an artist working in Stockholm
Société Réaliste is an artistic cooperative working in Paris
Anna Tsouloufi-Lagiou is an artist working in Athens
Elizabeth Ward is a dancer & a choreographer working in Athens & New York

London School of Economics and Political Science

Download PDF:

R Bhattacharya – Human Population Categories in Genomic Studies and Racialisation

Several notes of The ROBIN™ Currency are on display in the form of an explanatory installation. More denominations are available in exchange for other currencies exclusively at the gallery for a short period of time.

Along with The ROBIN™ Currency the artist presents a newer, photograohic work entitled “Raising of the Jolly-Roger on Lake Zürich”. ‘Hints to Workmen’ is the first time this work is presented to the public.

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Hints to Workmen
at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art
Sunderland, UK

Exhibition dates: 5 November 2010 – 5 February 2011
Preview: Thursday 4 November 6:00 – 8:00pm

Website

“A few small hints… a few nudges can help a lot… Libertarian paternalists should attempt to steer people’s choices in welfare-promoting directions. ‘Choice architecture’ can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions..” From Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, 2008

Harun Farocki (Berlin), Peter Watkins (Felletin, France), Gailan Abdullah Ismail(Erbil, Iraq),
Rainer Ganahl (New York), Vinca Petersen (Kent), Stuffit (Bristol), Anna McCarthy (Munich),
Baptiste Debombourg (Paris), Keetra Dean Dixon (New York), Robin Bhattacharya (Zurich),
The Economist, King Mob (London), Misteraitch (Sunderland), The Diggers (San Francisco),
The Open Council

‘Hints to Workmen’ takes its theme from two texts that have aimed to improve the lives of the majority of ordinary working people. ‘Hints to Workmen’ is the title of an educational pamphlet written when capitalism was in crisis – the mid-1840s. Its ideas seem to strangely parallel recent political advertising campaigns, and ‘Nudge’ theory beloved of the current leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. Both ‘Nudge’ and ‘Hints to Workmen’ suggest that “libertarian paternalists” in positions of power should provide their people with “hints” as to how best to live. But whose interests are at stake?

The exhibition offers a sequence of ‘hints’ that international artists suggest will help shape a better world. It brings together documentation of interventions that artists have realised in public spaces, and in the wider public sphere. The works examine the possibilities for new forms of direct action, from politicized forms of play to outright civil disobedience. They range from inventing your own currency to spearheading full-blown protests, to staging absurd events that bewilder the authorities. The exhibition asks us to re-imagine, to use historian Tony Judt’s recent words, what our “collective ideals [are] around which we can gather, around which we can get angry together, around which we can be motivated collectively?”

It begins with a series of bracing and bitterly funny advertising images for major banks from the 1930s, during the last major financial crisis. Surprisingly, they include a campaign by the ‘Church of England Building Society’ selling mortgages to a new class of potential homeowners. These images hint that what define the English are faith, hope and usury: faith in liberty, or else the freedom of the market; and hope for property and prosperity – with both obtained on credit.

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Robin Bhattacharya presents two projects. The first is his own personal currency, establishing his autonomy on the international capital markets. The second documents his interventions in the banking centre of Zurich, where he raises the pirate flag, the Jolly Roger, above a private yacht.

Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art: http://www.ngca.co.uk

Part 1 – go to position 40:30 for presentation by Robin Bhattacharya

Part 2:

Introduction (chair: Mushon Zer-Aviv)

• Mushon Zer-Aviv
• Heath Bunting
• Jean-Baptiste Naudy (Société Réaliste)
• Robin Bhattacharya
• James Kennard

Post Imperial maps of the world are being drawn up using the alleyways and rat runs ignored by empire’s former hubris. Now, using modern technologies, artists are able to overlay their maps over the standard projection, revealing an ocean of ignorance and bliss.

Tracing Mobility, the first of Radiator’s three international symposia, examines the emergence of a new art space, a space born out of the technology used to control and divide society. Taking place at Nottingham Contemporary on Saturday 15 May to coincide with the Uneven Geographies exhibition.

Video documentation of the full event: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/radiator-symposium-2010—tracing-mobility

Color Selection: Infrared
Original picture: DNA Portrait for one person 36″ X 54″ (92cm X 138cm)

It is a visual representation of some 8 STRs sequenced of the genome of Robin Bhattacharya.