CAPITALISM IN THE PUBLIC REALM – GOLD GUIDES ME – An Arabic Calligraphy Neon Text sculpture by Anne Katrine Senstad in the artists own handwriting
Now you can see my son how ludicrous and brief are all the goods in fortune’s ken, which humankind contend for: you see from this how all the gold there is beneath the moon, or that there ever was, could not relieve one of these weary souls.
Inferno, Canto VII, 4th Circle : Plutus
Dante Alighieri (1263 – 1321)
Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed.
Walter Benjamin, 1921
Gold Guides Me, 2015 – Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale. Scale 90 ft x 8 ft x 1 ft. LED signage., aluminum encasing, scaffolding.
The center-piece of Senstad’s solo exhibition Mal Educación, Good Children Gallery, New Orleans, is a large scale green neon text work in Arabic calligraphy written in the artists own handwriting. The art work is a self-referencing poetic proclamation with the original text work being Senstad’s monumental English version scaled after the Hollywood sign: Gold Guides Me, originally commissioned for the Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale in Belgium, 2015.
Gold Guides Me is a transformation of Hope Guides Me, another text piece Senstad has created in Arabic Calligraphy(2016), that she extracted from the 6th century Roman poet and statesman Boethius’ book, The Consolation of Philosophy, written while imprisoned awaiting execution. Boethius dedicated his last words to the world as a conversation with Lady Philosophy condensed in lyrical prose-poetry on truth and freeing the mind from the bondage of ones own failures and those of external forces, a confrontation between good and evil – his imprisonment self-declaration, reflects the soul confined by the physical body, materialism and society.
The art work Gold Guides Me is supported by Office for Contemporary Art Norway and he Norwegian Government’s Grant for Artists/ Kulturdirektoratet
Capitalism in the Public Realm 