Third Text

Sarah Hegenbart

Matterlurgy (Helena Hunter & Mark Peter Wright), Beneath the Signal and Noise, 2017, installation view in the 'Silver Sehnsucht' exhibition, the Silver Building, London. Courtesy of the artists; photo © @mr.plala.

The muddy and faded red flag could stand symbolically for a failed utopian vision: the vision of communism inspired by the desire for a fairer and more equal society in which the well-off no longer thrive on the exploitation of the poor. The flag features centrally in Beneath the Signal and Noise, an installation by the London-based artists Helena Hunter and Mark Peter Wright, who form the artist duo Matterlurgy. Matterlurgy's installation manifested the entry point to ‘Silver Sehnsucht’, a group exhibition in east London in September/October 2017 that featured the work of Brad Downey, Christian Jankowski, Christine Sun Kim, Christopher Stead, James Bridle, Jazoo Yang, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Mark Salvatus, Matterlurgy, Paola Torres Núñez del Prado, Poklong Anading, Rosana Antoli and William Mackrell. The curators Mara-Johanna Kölmel, Silvana Lagos and Rafael Schacter form part of the curatorial collective A(by)P, an abbreviation of the Dada-esqe name ‘Approved by Pablo’. The name is a self-ironical nod towards Pablo Picasso. If Picasso has become this modernist giant, the node of evaluation for everything to come after him in the visual arts, let's bring him down to earth and call him by his first name. Pablo is only one among many Pablos, and the Picasso standard is only one tool of measurement among many alternative approaches to what constitutes an artwork. As the name ‘Approved by Pablo’ remains open for various interpretations, so the collective remains open for the input of approaches and a changing team of new collaborators. A(by)P describe themselves as a discursive platform and a performative hub pursuing the creation of a democratic space in which ideas are formed, tested and realised in an open, public and horizontal manner. Hence, the collective resists a name that could be tied too closely to some kind of fixed identity.

A(by)P's previous exhibition ‘Venturing Beyond: Graffiti and the Everyday Utopias of the Street’ took place at Somerset House in central London in the spring of 2016, and this led to the offer to curate a show at the Silver Building. The Silver Building is an abandoned industrial complex comprising about 50,000 square feet. Conveniently located on the Docklands Light Railway between the docklands and London City Airport in east London, the concrete building with large windows facing the skyline of Canary Wharf evokes the charm of hipster hotspots such as the RAW Area in Berlin Friedrichshain, minus the tourists. The Silver Building was built in the 1960s to house the Carlsberg-Tetley Brewing company, but its location has a much longer history as a ‘circle of industrial hell’ that had a fundamental impact on the origins of the British labour movement.^[1] An industrial wasteland for more than twenty years, the social entrepreneur Nick Hartwright has collaborated with the Greater London Authority to transform the site into a creative hub offering workplaces and studios for artists and the creative industries. It was during this process of transformation that A(by)P was invited to use the space for their exhibition.

The Silver Building, London E16. Photo © @mr.plala.

With much inspiration, dedication and hard work, the curators assembled an impressive number of artists within less than six months. The majority of the artists developed site-specific responses that engage with the historical space – historical precisely because it was here where, after the defeat of the 1889 workers’ strike, the British labour movement was energised to an extent that it became a pivotal political force.^[2] Matterlurgy’s Beneath the Signal and Noise installation was integral to the exhibition since it epitomises one of the exhibition’s central targets, namely the interrogation of how the past of the Silver Building and its context within the area of Silvertown resonates in the contemporary. Matterlurgy created a site-specific response to the industrial environment of Silvertown. The eponym for this area in east London – which the writer Patrick Langley described as ‘a synecdoche of post-industrial Britain’ – was the industrialist Samuel Winkworth Silver.^[3] Silver amassed a fortune from his dealings in India rubber and gutta-percha, a natural latex from Palaquium gutta trees that are located in Sumatra, parts of Malaysia, Singapore and Borneo. (The question arises whether people in South Asia similarly benefited from their prosperous trees. Or does Silver’s wealth manifest, rather, as an example of the colonial exploitation characteristic of capitalist societies?)

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll’s installation Embassy Embassy (2017) looks out onto capitalist ideology from the perspective of socialism. Her installation explores the relics of two embassies, the Iraq and Australia embassies in East Berlin in the former GDR, buildings that mirror each other architecturally. Her archival research reveals how identical architectural features and visual symbols can gain an entirely different meaning when viewed against the backdrop of concepts of national identity. Art and architecture are here subordinated to national propaganda, as her in-depth documentation of material that she was able to rescue from the former Iraqi embassy shows (including a video documentation of an Iraqi citizen in exile who was almost poisoned at the embassy). Undermining propaganda, as Jason Stanley noted, ‘requires the call to action to be one that runs counter to the very political ideal it is explicitly represented as embodying’.^[4] This might involve an abandoning of national boundaries (at least conceptually) in order to account for the welfare of people living beyond one’s national boundaries. The neo-nationalism of current global capitalism (symbolised by the high-risers of Canary Wharf visible in the distance through the window of this installation) is, however, pursuing quite the opposite approach.

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Embassy Embassy, 2017, installation view. Courtesy of the artist; photo © @mr.plala.

But already in 1889, when the twelve-week-long workers’ strike was violently defeated (the strike ended when the workers gave up after Silver’s management pursued a strategy of starving them to death), there was plenty of reason to suspect that the power asymmetry in Silver’s factories not only affected people outside Britain but also the local workforce. The proximity of Silvertown to London’s current centre of capital concentration, Canary Wharf, intimates that little may have changed regarding the unequal distribution of goods from Silver’s time until today. The question, however, is whether in 2017, the year of the centenary of the Russian Revolution, there was a sharpened consciousness for the way in which living circumstances determine one’s being.

This was certainly not the case at the opening party. While generation Y was celebrating itself to the sounds of artist-turned-DJ Mark Leckey on a site that was once an industrial hell and which now uses its decayed charm to convey a feeling of social awareness,^[5] the neighbouring LA Lounge nightclub and bar accommodated some of those glad to be able to leave their commodification as labour power behind for the weekend to escape into the world of entertainment. The LA Lounge – ‘the exclusive new lavished [sic] nightclub and bar’, according to its Twitter profile – could be read as a symbol for the massive gap between the aspirations of the local populations desiring the Hollywood glamour of LA and the art tourists to heterotopia. The glamorous promises linked with the city of Los Angeles manifest the longing for a world that substantially differs from the grey and mundane reality of a Silvertown of high unemployment and being at the mercy of rental instability due to low home ownership. If gentrification ‘develops’ Silvertown, one wonders how many LA Lounge regulars would be able to stay in this neighbourhood.

So, what is the ‘Silver Sehnsucht’ the exhibition title announces? Sehnsucht is a German word that could be translated as a form of longing. While the longing of many locals – their Sehnsucht – may be directed to a place that could not be geographically and culturally further from their everyday reality, the curators romanticise this location as a space that elicits a ‘melancholic pining for the possible’.^[6] This led to the exhibition’s theme, ‘Silver Sehnsucht’ – but what does this ‘longing for silver’ mean? As Melanie McGrath contends in her Silvertown: An East End Family Memoir, ‘There never was any silver in Silvertown’.^[7] Sehnsucht, as the curators declare, must not be a nostalgia for something past; rather, it can be directed towards the future: ‘Sometimes you can be nostalgic for what is yet to come. That strange feeling of longing for a future as yet unknown.’^[8] In contrast to their temporal dimension, the longing of the locals seems to have a geographic dimension, a longing for a form of happiness that can be found elsewhere – in LA perhaps, but not in Silvertown.

As the curators rightly state in the exhibition leaflet, Sehnsucht is difficult to translate. Interrogating its etymology, it can be discovered that Sehnsucht goes beyond the melancholic longing for something past or distant. According to the Wörterbuch der Brüder Grimm (the Grimm brothers’ German dictionary),^[9] it may even connote an illness of painful desire, a love sickness. While this unfulfilled longing refers to an incapacity to love, it also keeps one going since the addiction to the love object for which there is such longing is so strong that it becomes a life-force. Sehnsucht might therefore be related to narcissism and the melancholia resulting from the depletion of one’s own self. A possible reason for this depletion is the incapacity to enter into a dialogue with ‘the Other’, and hence self-obsession and self-centredness (which can also refer to the centredness of one’s own peer group) prevail.

Marc Salvatus, Notes from the New World, 2015, installation view. Courtesy of the artist and 1335Mabini, Manila;
photo © @jhenyfy_muller.

This topic of ‘the Other’ features centrally in Mark Salvatus’s video work Notes from the New World (2015), with its references to the Philippines’ colonial past. Viewed against the backdrop of frameworks of value, it is also central in the poetic video installation Close Readings (2015) by Christine Sun Kim. In exposing the value systems in place that explicitly discriminate against those who are hearing-impaired, Sun Kim proposes new frameworks and reconstructs value systems that put ‘the Other’ at an advantage. 

Christine Sun Kim, Close Readings, 2015, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Carroll Fletcher, London; photo © @mr.plala.

The title of Christopher Stead’s Heterotopic Tourist (2017) sums up the discrepancies in the perception of Silvertown. While the location fulfils the desire of the art crowd to travel to a heterotopic space, the escapism of those who experience this heterotopia on a day-to-day basis does not involve a kind of imagination that makes this location more inhabitable. Stead’s hybrid between sculpture and painting utilises the structure of a fence on which resin, rope, iron, wood and canvas are fixed to act as a signifier for Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. Foucault developed the notion of heterotopia in his early philosophical writing to describe an actual space that is constituted by ‘a set of relations’ that remain ‘irreducible to one another’.^[10] Given that utopias are imagined sites of desire that correlate ‘with no real place’, heterotopias are thus opposed to utopias.^[11] They function as ‘counter-sites’ on which ‘all the other real sites that can be found (...) are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’.^[12] The interpretation of the Silver Building as a heterotopia opens up the question of whether the curatorial premise of the ‘Silver Sehnsucht’ project, and its realisation, enabled the venue to realise its potential as counter-site: an agonistic sphere in which divergent perspectives are confronted with each other.^[13]

Christopher Stead, Heterotopic Tourist, 2017, installation view. Courtesy of the artist; photo © @mr.plala.

As a heterotopia, the Silver Building Could facilitate the site for a counterpublic (Gegenöffentlichkeit) that Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt introduce in their Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (originally published in 1972). The idea behind the counterpublic is to provide a public platform for those whose voice has not yet been sufficiently heard. The notion of ‘counterpublic’ played a cricial role during EYESORE’s panel discussion ‘London in Limbo’ that A(by)P hosted, and which included three critical positions attempting to bring suppressed topics and social groups to the centre of attention. Arman Nouri, co-founder of EYESORE magazine, chaired the panel comprising the housing activists Focus E15, critic and columnist Phineas Harper and the photographer Rut Blees de Luxemburg. The speakers all delivered a critical interrogation of the development in central London, where council estate residents are being evicted so that these estates can be demolished and replaced by new ‘developments’, often totems to foreign investment.

(Flashback to 1889 when Karl Marx’s youngest daughter Eleanor wrote to her friend Laura on 25 December:

For my own poor part, look you, life seems to be becoming one long strike. First there was the Dock Strike. No sooner was that over than I was summoned to Silvertown, and for 10 mortal weeks I travelled daily to that out-of-the world place; speaking every day - often twice a day, in all weathers in the open air. ^[14]

Back then, Silvertown seemed to have already functioned as a site for the counterpublic, a space where the demands of those who were ignored were voiced.)

But what is the scenario today?

The notion of Sehnsucht may also refer to a state of wallowing potential options. The danger is that this could lead to a form of agency coined by indifference rather than any form of resistance to the causes of that indifference. Everyone remains stuck within his or her own cosmos. The distinction of taste allows only those who know a little about institutional theory to grasp the meaning behind the contemporary eclecticism of material that many others might simply conceive of as rubble. When Kluge and Negt attempted to refine Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, they did so because they realised alternative voices and perspectives need to be considered too. Hence, they contrasted the proletarian public sphere as counterpublic ‘in which the interests of the working class develop themselves’ with the bourgeois public sphere.^[15] The notion of the counterpublic may be extended to include all those who experience themselves as excluded from participation in the democratic process – for example, the voices highlighted by the activist group E15. The notion of the counterpublic, as Miriam Hansen notes in her foreward to Kluge and Negt’s book, is tied to the ‘category of community as a site of resistance’.^[16] Due to their understandable dependence on the city council and the development interests of the entrepeneur Nick Hartwright, the curators of ‘Silver Sehnsucht’ refrain from developing too harsh an attack on the current prevailing system. As they highlighted in an email correspondence, the exhibition was ‘never intended as a political statement rather than a vehicle to enable a conversation around topics linked to Silvertown’s past, present and future’. Fortunately, they find subtle ways to formulate their own criticism of dominant value systems.

Brad Downey, The Censorship Project, 2017, installation view. Courtesy of the artist; photo © @mr.plala.

Brad Downey’s The Censorship Project (2017) explores different forms of censorship applied to Turkish cinema posters. Downey scrutinises the impact different value systems have on the way in which pornographic imagery is altered as a form of advertisement. The nude female body appears to still pose a threat of corruption to conservative perceivers. To eliminate this threat, the imagery of female bodies is not only Photoshopped to the extent of eliminating all features of reality, but even the ‘real’ bodies are modified by plastic surgery so that they fit the criteria of conventional beauty dictated by capitalism’s beauty industry. While Downey explores the fine line between acceptable and unacceptable renderings of the female body, the self-image of the LA Lounge operates along the lines of sexual attraction. Online, the LA Lounge advertises the female as ‘experienced hostess’, as quasi-servant, catering to the male imagination. This could not be further away from the communist ideal of equality between men and women that Eleanor Marx once advocated in this very location. Does ‘Silver Sehnsucht’, then, maybe refer to a past in which communist utopias could still captivate the imagination of the working force to inspire their resistance?

This is quite different from what today captivates the fascination of those who think of themselves as non-elites or common people, ie the populus, and hence the truth-constructing criterion in an era of post-truth politics. Communist utopias no longer inspire those for whom Marx wrote them down. Twitter images promising a lavish lifestyle (such as those utilised by Donald Trump, for example, in his election campaign) do the job instead. Have the promises of neo-liberal capitalism become more attractive options than societal shifts towards more social equality? And what role does art play in this development?

Christian Jankowski’s Telemistica (1999), a single channel video documenting the responses of five Italian fortune tellers to the artist’s question about a possible participation in the Venice Biennale reveals that even artists cannot escape the competitiveness so typical of capitalist systems. At the same time, Jankowski also pursues an ironic disclosing of the mechanism of such value-creation processes and the systems of speculation within the art market. In recent years, the Venice Biennale has been heavily criticised as being a preview to Art Basel, the art fair where collectors can buy the works they have seen exhibited in Venice just one week before. Rather than resisting the capitalist system, art has simply become a pivotal part of it. As the recent sale of the Salvator Mundi (a pseudo-Leonardo painting in a desolate state) emphasised, there is no longer a comprehensible correlation between the aesthetic value of an artwork and its monetary value. Such financial speculations have become a substantial part of the art circus, and the question remains whether the inflation of value in the arts has contributed to the inflation of other types of values such as political ones, too.

Christian Jankowski, Telemistica, 1999, installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London; photo © @mr.plala.

‘Silver Sehnsucht’ certainly touches on these questions. William Mackrell develops his criticism of the dominant capitalist society in the video projection Breaking a Dance. When the artist’s attempted dance ends with more clumsiness than elegance, it is due to the heavy coins glued onto his costumes. Is capitalism damaging our basic skills of the creative expression that differentiates us from other beings? The reflection of the lights of Canary Wharf in the window behind the installation reminds the visitors of how topical David Harvey’s definition of capitalism is: ‘Capital is not a thing but a process in which money is perpetually sent in search of more money. Capitalists – those who set this project in motion – take on many different personae.’^[17] While the trade and artificial increase of exchange values happens in the centres of the finance industry such as Canary Wharf, the representatives of what is more and more becoming a culture industry need to critically interrogate themselves about their contribution within the process of creating more and more values without any actual correspondence. Is art effectively only one of the many personae of a disguised capitalism?

William Mackrell, Breaking a Dance, 2016, installation view. Courtesy the artist; photo © Agnese Sanvito

If the organisers had been a little bit less idealistic (idealism is certainly an admirable trait but may sometimes prevent the realisation of the brutality of the facts), they might have been more self-aware of the ways in which they unintentionally contributed to the capitalist logic of development themselves. While artists and curators might not have the power to stop such processes from happening, they can contribute to highlighting their contradictions and consequences by providing a platform for discussion and reflection, something that certainly happened in ‘Silver Sehnsucht’. Yet, the question remains whether the curators made the Silver Building especially attractive as an asset for investment by bestowing it with so much value. ‘Gentrification’ is certainly a key word here...

Another issue concerns the perversion of the market, with the idealists who work for free enabling others to profit from their dedicated hard work. While entrepreneur Nick Hartwright promised that the Silver Building will accommodate affordable artist studios in the next ten years, his ideas of conversion are already targeting a creative ‘industry’. Remembering Marcel Mauss and his emphasis on the gift economy: there has never been any such thing as a free gift.^[18] And, surprise surprise, the images on the website of Soda Studio, the architects with whom Hartwright collaborates, very openly suggested the gentrification that might follow the redevelopment. An elegantly dressed woman with pearl earrings and an oversized smart phone was chilling out in one of the lounges while a group of businessmen (and women) were finishing a conversation. On the opposite couch, a woman with long bare legs (almost as if she was not wearing a skirt at all) entertained an apparently relaxed man. What would Eleanor Marx have said about this, given that she realised early on that the inequality between men and women features centrally in the power asymmetries sustaining capitalism? The architectural sketch prominently featured the DLR in the background, highlighting one of the attractions of the Silver Building: its connectivity.

Walking up the staircase onto the first floor, William Mackrell’s fluorescent light fixtures, relicts that the artist has rescued from artists’ studios across London, were transformed into the installation Breaking a Line. The light tubes stand symbolically for the decreasing availability of affordable workspace in London for artists. Mackrell’s light fixtures, with their flickering ignition cycle, never lit up and never off, purposely failed to illuminate the Silver Building, and hence act as a reminder that the creative usage of this historical factory has temporal limits. Political decision-making would be needed to revert this development, but the focus in post-Brexit Britain is currently elsewhere engaged. As Anthony Gardner has pointed out:

‘When neoliberalized states withdraw from the public sphere, culture renews its social utility by filling in the gaps left behind. Yet, by willingly replacing the state as the provider of social services and political values, culture also potentially advocates and maintains the neoliberal status quo.’ ^[19]

Jazoo Yang’s objects in the Materials series (2017) epitomise this very problem. Yang’s practice is characterised by the collection and amalgamation of urban rubble – fragments from decayed sites in different regions. In this way, she conserves remnants from the past to revive them in the present. When Yang takes the ‘chipped surfaces’ from the Silver Building to revive them in a different geographical and temporal region, one may ask whether she does not equally smooth and gloss over their historical background as the developers will do with the Silver Building.

Jazoo Yang, Materials series, 2017, installation view. Courtesy of the artist; photo © @mr.plala.

How socioeconomic developments destroy local communities is explored in Paola Torres Núñez del Prado’s The Lost Code (Corrupted Data) (2017). The artist uses hand-made textiles that are created according to a traditional Andean technique in order to interrogate how local characteristics are wiped out by global capitalism of which gentrification forms a part. She conceives of such gentrification as a type of colonialism, since the gentrifier mostly fails to enter into a dialogue with the local residents. This raises the question whether the organisers of the exhibition succeeded in integrating the locals, the visitors to the LA Lounge perhaps, into their discourse, considerations and developments.

Paola Torres Núñez del Prado, The Lost Code (Corrupted Data), 2017, installation view.
Courtesy the artist, with support from IASPIS & the Swedish Arts Council; photo © @mr.plala.

In Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, the last man asks ‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’^[20] Nietzsche leaves the exact answer to these complex questions open, but he famously asserted that ‘one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star’.^[21] Rosana Antoli’s Chaos Dancing Cosmos illustrated the creative impetus of chaos. In utilising rubber tubes, Antoli also brings out how closely the history of the building is entangled in the network of colonialism and the communication age. Silver’s rubber and gutta-percha was pivotal to the fabrication of telegraph cables. Yet, in times of being literally able to communicate with everyone around the world, one often forgets simple things: one ‘still loves one’s neighbour and rubs oneself against him, for one needs warmth’.^[22]

^{Rosana Antoli, Chaos Dancing Cosmos, 500m, 2017, installation view during the performance The Movement of the Other, 2017. Courtesy of the artist; photo © @mr.plala.}

Why doesn’t Mark Leckey do some DJing in the LA Lounge next? The first steps of resistance to the (capitalist) development logic require a collaborating community. ‘Silver Sehnsucht’ and the connections it produced with participating artists, audiences and collaborators illustrated how a novel type of community may be created. Without a certain sense of a supporting community, it would have not been possible to put on a show such as this in a short time and without funding. The social historian John Tully summarises his study of Silvertown: The Lost Story of a Strike that Shook London and Helped Launch the Modern Labor Movement with a poignant observation:

‘The Silver’s Strike Committee could not but recognize defeat, yet insisted that their struggle was an “earnest” [sic] for the future. It is a lesson that perhaps needs to be relearned in today’s neoliberal age.’ ^[23]

Somehow it appears as if this exhibition might form an attempt to continue this earnest struggle by providing a platform that invites communal collaboration. Even though I agree with Anthony Gardner’s point that culture may fill the gap that occurs through the withdrawal of neoliberal states – and this is a dilemma this exhibition faced – I also think that ‘Silver Sehnsucht’ developed very clever strategies to undermine neoliberal ideologies. Whether these subversive strategies were understood may depend on the spectators’ engagement with the works, but ‘Silver Sehnsucht’ may have intimated ways in which art can achieve more than simply being a small cog in the big machine of neo-liberal capitalism, without even being fully aware of it.

 

^[1]   See Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx: A Life, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2014, p 324
^[2]   See John Tully, Silvertown: The Lost Story of a Strike that Shook London and Helped Launch the Modern Labor Movement, Monthly Review Press, New York, 2014
^[3]   See Patrick Langley, ‘Ordinary Voids’, The White Review, no 9, November 2013, extract available online: http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/ordinary-voids/ (accessed 17 November 2017).
^[4]   Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2015, p 53
^[5]   The factory building in which the opening party took place was only built in 1965 for British Oil and Cake Mills, so the working conditions might have been slightly better than in its Victorian predecessor.
^[6]   A by P, eds, Silver Sehnsucht, Group Show, exhibition booklet, London, 2017, p 1. The quote ought to be read in conjunction with the curators’ aim to interrogate the feeling of ambivalence that seems to be inscribed into Silvertown in order to uncover the fragments of past actions, the residues of present longing and the dizzily flickering futures. The curators link this feeling to Silvertown as a place stranded between the colonial forces of the past (the home of the eponymous Silvertown Rubber Works, but also of the East India Company and Tate & Lyle), the shiny financial power of Britain’s present (of Canary Wharf and the site formerly known as the Millennium Dome) and its future development and gentrification.
^[7]   Melanie McGrath, Silvertown: An East End Family Memoir, Fourth Estate, London, 2003, p 140
^[8]   A by P, eds, Silver Sehnsucht, Group Show, op cit, p 1
^[9]   The Grimm brothers’ German dictionary is, with about 330,000 headwords, the largest dictionary of the German language. The brothers began compiling it in 1838 and it was published in 1854.
^[10]  Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, in James D Faubion, ed, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, Allen Lane, London, 1998, p 178
^[11]  Ibid
^[12]  Ibid
^[13]  See A by P, eds, Silver Sehnsucht, Group Show, op cit, p 4
^[14]  Rachel Holmes, Eleanor Marx: A Life, op cit, pp 323–324
^[15]  Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, Verso, London and New York, 2016, p 92
^[16]  Miriam Hansen, ‘Foreword’, in ibid, p xxxvi
^[17]  David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, Profile Books, London, 2011, p 40
^[18]  Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies [1954], Routledge, London and New York, 2002
^[19]  Anthony Gardner, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2017, p 50
^[20]  Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One’, in K A Pearson and D Large, eds, The Nietzsche Reader, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, pp 245–292, p 259
^[21]  Ibid, p 258
^[22]  Ibid, p 259
^[23]  John Tully, Silvertown, op cit, p 214

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The ‘Silver Sehnsucht’ exhibition was at The Silver Building, Dock Road, London E16 from 30 September–8 October 2017

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Sarah Hegenbart currently works as a lecturer in art history in Munich, where she pursues her postdoctoral research on the function of images in the era of post-truth politics. Her previous research at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London scrutinised Christoph Schlingensief’s Opera Village Africa in Burkina Faso as postcolonial Gesamtkunstwerk. She has also curated numerous exhibitions, such as ‘Unrecounted: Historical Amnesia in Germany and Namibia’ in Venice (Palazzo Pisani, 4–9 May 2015) and ‘Juergen Teller: Pictures and Words’ in London (German Embassy, 20 February until end of March 2012).