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Stevenson is pleased to present Money, Money, Money by Meschac Gaba. The works in this exhibition date from 1994 to 2016, and provide an overview of Gaba’s career-long investigation into the systems that create and uphold social, cultural and monetary value. Across installation, sculpture and prints, currency – whether in use, devalued or decommissioned – is used by the artist as a punchline, discursive tool and embellishment.
Informed by his experiences growing up in Benin – a socialist state until 1990 – and living between its capital of Cotonou and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Gaba observes the structural principles that shape relations between Africa and the Western world. His constructions blur the line between art and the everyday to playfully elucidate both the fragility and totalising nature of systems of exchange.
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‘I took the painting aspect out of the work, but kept the money. Because money is the sinews of war; it’s the chief. You see, I don’t like talking about colonisation, but at the same time money can colonise. Maybe that’s why I use money, because I refuse to use the word colonisation. Besides, money travels.’
― Meschac Gaba in conversation with Chris Dercon, Rotterdam, 2000
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‘Meschac Gaba began by trying his hand at painting – a kind of painting in which he sought to move beyond the frame and whose motifs were evolving in a threedimensionality that begged to be expressed on other surfaces and other supports. I remember the young man he was then as if it were yesterday: he had a head full of ideas, dreams of travels, real and imaginary. One already felt in the young artist, who was building his first weapons, an inextinguishable will to confront what was then called contemporary African art. Thus, the work he produces
today cannot, must not, be read without looking back at the reflections that were propelling him at that time. What there is, is a continuum, a body of work that is perpetually evolving, in which projects call and respond to one another, are at times the consequence of some past experience whose marrow he has not yet all extracted.’
― Simon Njami, Meschac Gaba: The Constant Gardener, 2010 -
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‘Benin, as a society, operates more or less exclusively on the business of trading per se. The virtual absence of any intensive exploitation of natural resources, of any large-scale manufacturing, or, for that matter, of any significant agricultural production. Tropical, fertile, blessed with a basic sufficiency of food and subsistence material for survival and shelter, the society has evolved (unusually, if not uniquely) as a quintessentially mercantile economy, in which the fact of trading becomes its own justification and, in ways that sit uncomfortably with economic theory, sustains itself in anomalous defiance of economic fundamentals.
In such an economic climate, what is bought and sold, exchanged or bartered is less significant than the fact of the transaction. Surplus value – not in the classically Marxist sense of capitalist exploitation by captains of industry, but nonetheless not unrelated to this – comes to be the stock in trade, as value abstracted from and not directly predicted by labour or the production of economic value in the first place. The real currency here is entirely abstract, surplus value itself; what is being bought and sold is hardly more or less than buying and selling itself.’
― Ivor Powell, Two for the Price of One, 2009
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Meschac Gaba: Money, Money, Money
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