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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 -
‘In the context of the cataclysmic neo-liberal economic policies of the 1980s and 1990s imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and through the Structural Adjustment Programs that regulated the policies in African economies, the idea of value became even sharper. In these works of the early 1990s Gaba frames a concise connection between social value and cultural capital. He links devaluation to money, and money with the practical issues of survival in the midst of the chaos of illiberal impoverishment of masses of Africans. Nevertheless, value in Gaba’s framework is not predicated on the factionalised transformation of absence into presence. It has a concrete locus of power relations. For him, the impediment to understanding his particular form of analytical museology occurs when it becomes mixed up with the discourse of colonialism.’
― Okwui Enwezor, The Death of the African Archive and the Birth of the Museum: Considering Meschac Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art, 2013
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‘One approach to thinking about value for Gaba emerged out of the devaluation of the CFA Franc – the currency union of Francophone West African countries – in the late 1980s in Benin. The devaluation unleashed a massive economic crisis across the entire region of the monetary union, and the authors of the ensuing neo-liberal economic policies thought nothing of their disruptive impact on the lives of Africans. In their important essay “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis”, Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman, using the effect of devaluation in Cameroon as a case study, examine the scale of the social disruption and the crisis of subjectivity it produced. Gaba specifically links his early works to these efforts on subjectivity. In his paintings-cum-collages, created with the nearly worthless currency as a surface for his gestures, the implicit critique of devaluation was directed not only at the political economy, but also at the cultural economy.’
― Okwui Enwezor, The Death of the African Archive and the Birth of the Museum: Considering Meschac Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art, 2013 -
Mitsubishi 4X4 and Mercedes (2008) are included from Gaba’s Tresses series. This body of work was first conceptualised during a residency at PS1 Contemporary Art Centre in New York and has since been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the World Bank and the Biennales of Havana, Gwangju and Sharjah. First modelled on buildings and then, in this second iteration, on motor vehicles, the series further questions the associative symbols of technological achievement and prosperity. Created in collaboration with hairdressers in Cotonou, these sculptures formed part of a six-hour masquerade procession through the city, a video of which will accompany them on the exhibition. About this documentary footage, capturing a range of responses ranging between fear and indifference, Gaba has noted, ‘fetishes are not an uncommon sight in Benin; it is the artist that people are unaccustomed to seeing in the street.’
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‘For my most recent exhibition in Benin, I told people I would like to do a painting show. People were shocked, they told me I had moved on and wasn’t a painter anymore. But I just wanted to have fun and told people I could do whatever I wanted. They were very curious about what I would paint. So I told them I was not going to paint anything – everything was already there! I called the show Colours of Cotonou and it consisted of found colours (walls, clothing, etc), which I framed with frames made out of money. The word cadre in French can mean both “frame” and “political boss”, so I liked the ambiguity and the suggestion of corruption. Anyway, when you first see the work, the pastels don’t look very African, but nobody can complain because I did not make them up myself – I found them in Benin.’
― Meschac Gaba in conversation with Joost Bosland, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 2007
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‘Colours of Cotonou (2007-9) is a formal work that interrogates artistic principles, but it can also be understood in many other ways. According to Gaba, he was inspired to create this installation after hearing a speech in which the president of Benin said “Cadre le cadre” and “Les intellectuels, le cadre-vide!” The French word Cadre has multiple meanings, including “frame”, “framework” and “executive” or “director”, and is often used to refer to the political elite. Intrigued by this dual meaning and the president’s railing against the “Intellectuals, the empty frame!” – effectively, those in positions of power who represent the city, but do nothing for it – Gaba began to think about the anti-frame. The frame, like the museum, is a device that signals value. By framing nothing, or very little, the artist literally creates something unique out of the banal and gives equal prominence to positive and negative space. On a metaphorical level the installation can be read as a comment on society in which opposite or contrary forces not only exist, but are also co-dependent.’
― Kerryn Greenberg, Meschac Gaba: Framing a Space, 2013
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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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