Currency, Kuyu Aka

16 - 26 October 2008

Identification, credit, access, status - Kuyu Aka's plastic smart-card art makes playful use of these idioms. In these individualised and adapted cards technology becomes an index of itself as a potential 'real asset' . Currency – the exhibition and viral distribution saw the Frieze Art Fair 2008 bombarded with emergency threat warnings.

'With these 'Red Cards' I intended to provoke a phantasmic 'terror alert', a viral currency and hand held art craze, or if possible all three' says the author who cheerfully adapts Rimbaud and Marais. 'I'm dealing in identity and deception or in authenticity as an existential metaphor for projections about the other and technology'. 'The many parallels between conceptual art and comedy are perhaps a defence against its neutralisation by power'.
'Our Mutual Friend' is an editioned album of 101 mag-striped, holographed and embossed dye-thermal PVC prints accompanying the exhibition.

Images

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