Galleries in Paris

The infinite debt         
A solo show by Eva Barto

The infinite debt regards the exhibition as a setting for conjecture whose motives and objectives remain undefined, in the way that a system would govern a parallel economy in constant and infinite motion. It refers to the ouroboros (ancient symbol of a serpent eating its own tail) pointing to both the notion of a closed system and the paradox itself.

The cycle is set in motion through a constant reworking of an accumulation of goods and assets, not unlike the outlaw and gold digger Cisia Zyke, a fortune hunter emblematic of the 1980s who always reinvested his winnings and ended up in debt everywhere. It’s also a reminder of the way the shell company Trust triggers different feelings and obscures the facts. By definition, the company – whose name appears throughout the exhibition – is never fully explained, but operates behind the scenes (almost) invisibly.

From the start, the visitor enters a puzzling area, filled with clues and objects whose meaning is uncertain: cigarettes spread around with an odor of cold tobacco reminiscent of late night deal making, stickers with the name of the company, a sign from the gallery whose name is engraved in reverse on the back, glass or resin molds for some swindle or a (fake?) corporate liquidation. Together, the sculptures, constructions and arrangements tell the story at the heart of the exhibition and which the visitor must apprehend in order to grasp what’s under examination: questions of trust, gain and loss, and parlays that interact in an economic reality, the reality in which we all live, and which is reflected in the inextricable and never ending debtor-creditor relationship fundamental to our society as described by the philosopher and sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato.

As such, the area of Level One is left raw, with the rods and hangars remaining from the previous occupants who used it for a fashion week rental, which provides the very structure for this parallel economy.

That concocted holdover, reminder of the real privatization of the space for Fashion Week, is precisely the engine that drives the need for revisions along different lines, along the edges that get included in the production of objects whose status is sketchy: the loaded dice, the black box, the negotiating table now folded away where deals for short term debt are offered to any and every one by the artist, thus linking in a very real way the donor and the artist until who knows when.

The items in The infinite debt contribute to the idea of infinite movement and consumption, like a never ending circle in constant operation. And is just like the correspondence scattered about, whose sender and recipient are the gallery, as if to enhance the parallel activity.

It’s also a reference to the organization and visuals of the exhibition repeated throughout, whose ostensible profit motive is from a different economy, this one in the project All in whose objective is to wager all the money of a production grant at the casino and use the outcome to publish the entire history of the wager, its gains and losses.

Thus, just as with the Trust Company or the character T.I.N.A (There is no alternative) created by the critic Flora Katz, whose text enters a dialogue with the objects and themes of profit, gambling, confidence and loss, the fiction that is the exhibition is revealed and submerged. At the same time, elements that evoke cheating or deception, and games of chance are clearly reminders of another disruptive economy based in reality and mirroring a society relentless in its relationship to the fundamental and structural debtor-creditor system and the ever growing states of dependence and guilt it brings about.