Secession presents Thomas Locher Homo Oeconomicus an exhibition on view July 5–September 1, 2013.
A pioneer of neo-conceptual art since the late 1980s, the German artist Thomas Locher examines the rules of language and the complex ways in which it functions. His exhibition Homo Oeconomicus, specially conceived for the Secession, continues his examination of the relationship between language and economics as well as the subject acting within this system, themes he has focused on for some years now. In a series of images and films, most of them new, he treats aspects of exchange, structures of credit, belief, and credibility, and the impact of these notions on the constitution of the subject.
He analyses the cycles of give and take, profit and loss, or care and neediness, coupling image citations such as Giotto’s Kiss of Judas or Hieronymus Bosch’s The Conjuror with texts referring to the work of Karl Marx or quoting from Jacques Derrida’s Donner le temps 1. La fausse monnaie (Given Time I: Counterfeit Money), which addresses the im/possibility of a gift. In two other, digital text works he uses the construct of cinematic opening or closing “credits” in order to address the English term “credit” and the future-oriented logic of giving credit.
Thomas Locher’s text-image constructions are conceived as an open interaction involving multiple levels of meaning, which between thesis and antithesis reveal a large number of other perspectives and factors that are normally excluded. In Homo Oeconomicus Locher uses the contradictory phenomenon of the gift in order to once again render visible the formal and informal forces that bind our society together.
Thomas Locher, born in Munderkingen, Germany in 1956, lives and works in Berlin.
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