LIQUID ASSETS

CAPITALISM IN THE PUBLIC REALM – LIQUID ASSETS Neon text sculptures in English and Chinese

Money Never Sleeps

Walls Street 2

**Liquid Assets**, (Chinese Verison), 2023 by Anne Katrine Senstad. Ediiton of 6. Neon, transformer, wires, fastners. Scale: 30″ x 30 ” x 2″

**Liquid Assets**, 2020 by Anne Katrine Senstad. Edition of 6. Neon, transformer, wires, fastners. Scale: 14″ x 28″ x 2″

**Liquid Assets**, 2023 by Anne Katrine Senstad. Ediiton of 6. Neon, transformer, wires, fastners.. Scale: 28″ x 8″ x 2″

The neon text-based work LIQUID ASSETS is aligned with the critical text works in the Capitalism in the Public Realm project that Senstad established in 2014 with the monumental text work Gold Guides Me commissioned for The Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale. The text work examines the process of societal descension and erosion of ethics through the liquidation of human value and the autonomous citizen, liquidation of natural resources that have led to a climate of Anthropocene realities and loss of ecological sustainability, societal infrastructure, and reduction of the human spirit transformed to pure currency. Countries are reduced to corporate financial structures, harboring shell companies, licensing out or selling national parks, indigenous land, and oceans as wholesale commodity to international private corporations. What is the future of the citizen and sovereign countries?

“The Western man has at last been reduced to a gram of currency“. Michelle Houellebecq, The Elemental Particles

With the Neon text sculpture, LIQUID ASSETS, Senstad plays with the language of finance and the stock market system in a variety of classical advertising signages in English, Chinese, and Russian (minted not-for-sale NFT’s by GGM Holdings), and transforms the term for tradable commodities and assets into a snappy pop culture, thereby humorizing the underlying serious philosophical and social-political questions implied. The term representing the action of commerce itself seeking a prosperous outcome for one, is transformed into a consumerist signage of commodification of ideas manifested into bright light as neon sign in Helvetica letters – itself being sold. In utilizing the commercial and consumerist mass production materials, reminiscent of Las Vegas gambling culture, religious neon signs, and advertising/sales signage aesthetics, Senstad suggests that in an era of greed and spiritual crisis, everything and anything is for sale, to be speculated in and considered ready to be commoditized and fast; an unbearable bubble of speculation, void of a global sustainable future.