Goldin+Senneby: Standard Length of a Miracle

Title: Standard Length of a Miracle
Artists: Goldin+Senneby
Dates: January 27–May 15, 2016
SSE location: The Library, Stockholm School of Economics
Format: A mutating retrospective presented across multiple venues

Standard Length of a Miracle was a mutating retrospective by Goldin+Senneby, presented through installations and performances at Tensta konsthall and at places not primarily associated with contemporary art, including the Stockholm School of Economics.

The Third Swedish National Pension Fund, the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, A Day’s March, Cirkus Cirkör and Prince Eugen’s Waldemarsudde also became stages for reactivations of works from the artists’ previous ten years. Moving the artistic field into public institutions and commercial settings shifted perspectives on where art can take place and who its audience can be.

Economic and financial structures increasingly govern everyday life, yet concepts such as repo rates, tax havens and derivatives can remain abstract. Rather than rejecting the financial sector, Goldin+Senneby borrow market-inspired methods to infiltrate and illuminate the consequences of late capitalism. The retrospective addressed precarious labour, the commercialization of the art world, and the highs and crashes of financial markets.

The SSE Library featured two works that, like the School’s curriculum, examine methods and mechanisms in finance. Contemporary art and economics can both appear abstract to those unfamiliar with their languages; terms such as short selling and hedge funds can create a sense of being controlled by unseen forces. Zero Magic and Banca Rotta make those forces tangible through illusion, historical objects and material transformation.

Zero Magic (2016)

With: Malin Nilsson (magician), Théo Bourgeron (sociologist of finance), Kevin Keener (patent attorney), Johan Hjerpe (designer) and Moa Ott (carpenter).

A magician creates illusions, making us see things that do not exist or are not really happening. The word magic originates from the Persian magush, meaning “to be able” or “to have power”. In Zero Magic, the magic trick takes place in the financial markets.

Goldin+Senneby infiltrated a secretive hedge fund in the United States and recreated its short-selling practices—the selling of shares that one does not own. In collaboration with Malin Nilsson and finance sociologist Théo Bourgeron, they developed a magic trick for the financial market with the capacity to influence perceptions of a company’s value and profit from that shift. The magic box contains the props and equipment needed to perform these financial manipulations, as well as historical references to controversial magic tricks performed offstage, in real life.

Banca Rotta (I Dispense, Divide, Assign, Keep, Hold) (2012)

With: Anna Heymowska (set designer).

Banca Rotta is a seventeenth-century money changer’s table that the artists had sawn in half. The word bank derives from the Italian banca, meaning a bench or table. According to historical accounts, when a money changer became insolvent, the trading table was destroyed: banca became banca rotta, or “broken bench”.

The work follows the history of banking through an object that embodies failure, insolvency and financial risk. It later entered the SSE Permanent Collection.

Goldin+Senneby is the collaborative artistic practice established in 2004 by Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby. Based in Stockholm, the duo has explored the structural relationship between conceptual art and finance through virtual worlds, offshore companies, withdrawal strategies and subversive speculation.

Their projects often borrow methods from financial markets, legal systems, theatre and magic. They work through extensive collaborations with writers, economists, actors, designers, researchers and other specialists, allowing authorship to shift between the artists and the people who activate each project.

In Standard Length of a Miracle, this approach transformed a retrospective into a changing network of installations and performances. By placing works inside a business school, a pension fund, a financial regulator, a clothing store, a circus and a historic art museum, the duo made institutional and economic structures part of the exhibition itself.

Read more: Goldin+Senneby’s website, the Amant interview, and the CLOT Magazine interview.