Capitalism in the Public Realm

Good Children Gallery

4037 St. Claude Ave

New Orleans, LA 70117

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Mal Educación by Anne Katrine Senstad

Curated by Christopher Saucedo

November 11 – December 3, 2023

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Mal Educación is the second solo exhibition by Norwegian artist Anne Katrine Senstad at Good Children Gallery as part of her ongoing research project, Capitalism in the Public Realm. The exhibition explores the intersection between light and text to address critical subjects of ethics, agency, citizenry, and allegory.

Playing on the novelty of language, Mal Educación presents a sublime critique of capitalism and our contemporary crises through text-based works in Arabic, Chinese, English, German, Russian and Spanish. Here, Senstad invokes the aesthetic value systems of various languages in deconstructing the expression La Mala Educación. In effect Senstad interprets Wittgenstein’s language game and word-meaning, whereby language is defined by the actions into which it is woven. The exhibition title is drawn from Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar’s 2004 film, Bad Education, which portrays how institutions of power oppress the disenfranchised and marginalized.

Inspired by Almodóvar’s acuity, Senstad’s text works are intended to motivate ethical considerations of the moral zeitgeist. They examine the alterations of our value systems wrought by financial greed and corporate power. Senstad’s work compels place in a consumerist society – as well as how to resuscitate a shared humanity in the spectre of war and posthumanism. Through light and color, art can open the discourse on the hidden value systems underlying society and the culture at large.

For the center-piece of the exhibition, Senstad returns to a poetic evocation of ethics that her work has explored in the past, Gold Guides Me — a neon text work in Arabic calligraphy transliterated in the artist’s handwriting. Those familiar with Senstad’s oeuvre will identify the reference to her monumental work commissioned by the Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale in Belgium in 2015 where said phrase was presented in latin alphabet letters scaled after the Hollywood sign. Gold Guides Me capitalizes on the phrase, Hope Guides Me from the 6^th century poet and statesman Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy — a valediction for Lady Philosophy of life’s vagaries and vicissitudes as conjured by the author while imprisoned and awaiting execution. In exchanging “Hope” with “Gold” Senstad’s wordplay invokes the ontological forces underlying institutions of power, oppression, and greed.

Consistent with this narrative, Senstad’s text-based video installation, Money Above All – Russian Version (2022) by the artist’s holding company-as-art-work, GGM Holdings (LINK: https://opensea.io/ggmholdings ), is part of her activistic web project issuing not-for-sale NFTs of corporate-military aesthetics and text-based art that critique the current era’s war climate and the arms industry. With the diptych text piece Liquid Assets in Chinese and English (2020-2023) in dialogue with the static neon sculpture Ascension/Descension Graph X, (2023),Senstad addresses the notion of a human being’s intrinsic value in the context of financial and corporate scaling systems. Further, the sculptural abstraction Portal for Perpetuity VII, (2023) intimates nature’s perpetual cycle of regeneration and how mankind’s present grappling with notions of scarcity and of infinity through scientific progress and technological innovations continue to advance the human enterprise.

And as the ideological debates of said human enterprise continue into the twenty-first century, as alternative value systems are posited in response to class divisions wrought by an acceleration of the Anthropocene, Senstad returns to Marx with IST-MARX MARX-IST, (2023), a play on the German word “ist” invoking Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet, (Act 3, Scene 1) — ”To be or not to be” —to elucidate the famous ideologues’ impact on today’s existential struggle between freedom, human rights and civil rights.

The exhibition is supported by Office for Contemporary Art Norway and he Norwegian Government’s Grant for Artists/ Kulturdirektoratet.

Money Above All, 2023 – video stills from Not-for-Sale-NFT’s on GGM Holdings Opensea Platform and Instagram