INVITATION TO PAWNSHOP
Staš Kleindienst: Šupak The drawing Šupak can be seen as a comment on the crack between the old and the new. Šupak, Serbian word for execretory opening at the end of the alimentary canal, also used to describe a treacherous person, together with the resembling image (EU flag), suggests the demistification of a democratic symbol which stands between those who lead and those who follow. The drawing, specifically created for the project Pawnshop Basel, also puts into question a singular statement as such when being placed inside a larger cultural/economic structure.
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Sebastjan Leban: A Pound of Flesh The work A Pound of Flesh exposes the extortionary logic of subprime loaning where a loan/pawn is offered at such an enormous interest rates that it makes virtually impossible for the borrower to return it. This strategy is applied on borrowers that normally pertain to the lower class and whose credit rating is null. The appropriation of the pound of flesh represents the ultimate necropolitical gesture, the traces of which can be found in European literature tradition (The Merchant of Venice) were the loaner/pawn broker, besides embracing the normal, as Marx would say, capitalist paradigm of being a vampire-like creature that sucks blood from the living, executes the act of sucking blood from the almost dead. Thus the logic of necropolitics conflates with biopower. The pound of flesh does not just represent a gesture of criticality in relation to the usurious debt system of the subprime loans/pawns but it incorporates the very reality of all those forced to live at the margin of society whose only possibility to return the loan is to trade their own flesh/lives. »Since I already know that I won't be able to return the loan, I am giving you my pound of flesh.«
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