A Moeda Viva [Living Currency]

A Moeda Viva [Living Currency] is a group exhibition conceived by Maria do Mar Fazenda to be presented at Galeria Quadrum. Its title is borrowed from Pierre Klossowski’s essay “La Monnaie vivante” published in 1970. This curatorial project also invokes “L’Argent”, the last film directed by Robert Bresson, which in turn is based on the short story “The Forged Coupon” by Leo Tolstoy. Each of these works explores the predominance that money can play in our lives. How we as a society relate to this entity is the object of analysis in economics, but concepts such as debt, inflation, credit, banking, loans, finance, etc. represent abstract forms of money and value. The exhibition’s narrative proposes a set of works that reinvents various dimensions of the convention we know as money. Currency is in essence a symbol of trade and exchange and transformation are recurring gestures of these artists as they seek to reveal, without ever fully do so, that which escapes us.