We’re Still Dancing, 2012
This exhibition operates as a closed circuit, examining the structural inevitability of the 2008 financial crisis and the cultural paralysis of the neoliberal era. The environment is anchored by the infamous 2007 mandate from former Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince: “As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” Rendered in gold spray paint over standard laser-jet prints, the text degrades the rhetoric of wealth into a bureaucratic, material surface. It is an institutional command operating as a visual trap, repeating the tautology of a market that cannot stop itself.
Surrounding this text are the architects of the collapse. In a series of altered corporate portraits, the mouths of global banking CEOs have been physically folded away. What remains is the visual architecture of authority, stripped of its capacity to explain or apologize. They are reduced to gestures of power, silently enforcing the mandate written on the wall.
The installation further enforces a temporal collapse between the origin of the free-market consensus and its inevitable failure. A video of New Year’s Eve celebrations from 2012 is manipulated—played in reverse and at varying speeds—to mathematically sync with ABBA’s Happy New Year. Written in 1979, at the exact dawn of the Thatcher-Reagan political shift, the audio acts as an ideological anchor. By dragging 2012 backward to align with 1979, the work physically manifests a cancelled future, a timeline endlessly looping back to the inception of its own ideology.
Placed on the floor, an isolated boombox introduces the only site of resistance: a layered, overlapping loop of a speech on hope by Chris Hedges. However, stripped of its narrative clarity and multiplied over itself, the discourse is reduced to a dense, illegible cacophony. Hope is presented as material detritus—an abandoned object drowned out by the slick, systemic loop of the room.
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