Marie Reinert: Bull & Bear

On view 1 – 31 March 2015

Marie Reinert’s artistic strategy consists of “infiltrating”, as she calls it, various enterprises and companies. The video Bull & Bear, for example, is the result of a month spent in the offices of the Dutch National Bank.

The title of this work refers to a term used in finance to describe the radical fluctuations of the market. Armed with a purpose-built compass that determines the position of the North based on current exchange rates for the Euro and the US Dollar, the artist set out to explore the building of the bank – a corporate architecture that is to some extent reminiscent of the vertical arrangement in the U-Tower.

But the constant fluctuations in the currency market cause the compass to spin madly, prompting the artist to wander about randomly, discover hidden spaces and, of course, meet the employees. Through her performance as well as the resulting video, Reinert connects a physical building to the financial market and makes the absurdity of the economic system visible.

Marie Reinert (*1971 in France) lives and works in Berlin.

Selected by Thibaut de Ruyter