DEBT
14 December 2024 – 16 February 2025
Curated By: Hana Ostan-Ožbolt-Haas
Artists: Gleb Amankulov, Benjamin Hirte, David L. Johnson, Tammy Langhinrichs, Artur Schernthaner-Lourdesamy, Miriam Stoney, Magdalena Stückler, Frank Wasser
“I feel like I’m always behind, whether it’s at work or in my personal life. I don’t give back enough. No matter what I do and how hard I try, I am always in the – [minus]. Never reaching that 0?! But I feel guilty for even having these thoughts. I might as well be under the rubble,” a friend in her mid-thirties writes to me this July, and it stays with me. She feels in “constant debt,” and I can relate.
Debt is a broad topic that can be explored through different lenses, including its emotional, social, historical and economic dimensions. Particularly in the context of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has divided the art world in recent months in a way that few issues have, many people are confronted with feelings of guilt and obligation in relation to their active/non-active involvement in a discussion that has been so strongly influenced by what we might call historical debt. Historical events and their long-lasting effects can be interpreted as a form of debt; the legacy of colonisation or wars, where the descendants of those who suffered demand recognition and restitution for past injustices. In this context, art often serves as a means of remembrance and a call for accountability.
The economic aspect of debt – financial debt – is something that many who work in the precarious conditions of the art world face on a daily basis; living from one honorarium and commission to the next, just below zero. With declining wages and pensions largely deferred until later in life, access to credit and personal stock portfolios have been proposed as a tool, a form of ‘investment’ in the self, capable of compensating for changing social and economic conditions. The right to (higher) education housing, forms of social protection and social services has been redefined as a privilege conditional on the acceptance of credit and private insurance. Who is privileged enough to be able to operate as part of the art system that is so classist?
Symbolically, debt can represent any kind of imbalance. To what extent, then, can it be argued that the concept of debt is the essence of it all? The ontological debt – human subjects always ‘owe’ other human beings – is incurred by the very act of being born into the world. (Elettra Stimilli, The Debt of the Living: Ascesis and Capitalism, 2017). To sharpen the previous statement – debt is the material form of the idea that we must redeem ourselves and ‘pay a price’ for the very act of being.
Imbalanced, between loss and resistance, between the fragility and persistence of the (power) structures that bind us together, how to find the way?
Text courtesy of Salzburger Kunstverein
