PTA ASSOCIATION OF BARD HIGH SCHOOL EARLY COLLEGE INC – Bard Bash Spring Auction 2018
Auction Ends: May 2, 2018 08:35 PM EDT

Art

Artist Peter Macapia, PH.D- Currency Series

Item Number
134
Estimated Value
1200 USD
Opening Bid
300 USD

Item Description

Title: Mies Plaza, Tahrir Square

From the series, Border Currencies

Artist: Peter Macapia

Date: 2014

Material: archival inkjet on rag

Edition: 6 of 12

Dimensions: 20” x 20”

 

Courtesy of the Artist

 

Biography: http://petermacapia.com/studio/about

 

Concept:

Border Currencies are part of an ongoing extended research project on the relation between political and economic power, and the distribution of space concerning law and sovereignty, in which a fiat currency is invented to function as having a differing value depending which side of a border it functions.  Mies Plaza, Tahrir Square is an edition within the series which examines the historical conflict between the west and the east identified through concepts of public space and the naturalization of democratic space as a zone of freedom in contrast to the labyrinth of tyranny.  This Orientalist view persists today with the concept of the democratization of knowledge and political activism in social media and the internet and freedom of speech which appears to have analogous relations with free democratic space.  In fact, most urban public spaces in the west are privately owned public space and entirely restricted by law, as was seen in the various displacements of the Occupy movement in New York.  The innovation of the corporate plaza, introduced by Mies van der Rohe in the late ‘50s, serves to illustrate that public space exists on condition that it is simultaneously not a political space.  By contrast, the events that transpired between Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation as a protest to government abuse of citizen’s right to economic opportunity in public space, and which inspired the activation of public space throughout the Arab Spring and the Egyptian Revolution symbolized in Tahrir Square, indicates that the Western model of a public space, upon which Tahrir square was originally designed, is similarly a fiat currency.  Vending in NY is restricted to the periphery of these spaces while in many other regions of the world they are the heart of it.

 

 

 

Item Special Note

Pick up available in New York City or buyer pays to ship.