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Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2007 10:22:02 GMT
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Performing The Financial Gaze at n.w.w.n.n.l.n.o. Brussels

Performing The Financial Gaze at n.w.w.n.n.l.n.o.
 Brussels Performing the Financial Gaze is a screening and discussion, featuring the Brussels-based artist duo Katleen Vermeir & Ronny Heiremans, and London-based artist and writer Emily Rosamond. After a presentation of Vermeir & Heiremans film Masquerade (2015), Rosamond will lead a dialogue with the artists, and a discussion with a small group of guests. In the discussion, we will explore how Vermeir & Heiremans film performs a financial gaze; in other words, it enacts how financial interests themselves "see" the world. 

The film Masquerade borrows its title and structure from Herman Melville's novel The Confidence man, His Masquerade. It is also, like Melville's, a narrative about confidence, both in form and content. The film is set up as a factual-fiction TV reportage. A TV-reporter is telling the story of the "initial public offering" (IPO) of Art House Index. Art House Index proposes the transformation of Vermeir & Heiremans' home into a financial instrument. It is a financial tool that measures the value of the artists' Art House, using parameters like the global real estate market, confidence in the art markets and the attention the artists' brand Vermeir & Heiremans generates. 
 In their film Vermeir & Heiremans present the financial market as the "mise en scene" of the narrative. In the live-edited version of the film, the impersonal vision of the market sets the narrative in motion a.o. by the attention the public is paying to the film. The narrative (on the financialisation of the artists' house) is automated by an algorithm and live-edited depending on the actual performance of the Art House Index. The index going up or down, in real time triggers a switch between two timelines of Masquerade, one of which shows the fully post-produced finished film while the other captures variations, rehearsals, mistakes and outtakes. It is "the market", that pushes forward the final narrative, triggered by investment decisions taken by absent bodies and based on predictions of future value or loss...With the attention of the public as one of Art House Index' parameters, the viewer is feeding into the algorithm. Thus we end up with a dynamic spiral of infinite regression, in a truly financial gaze, creating value ex nihile in perpetuum. 

This event emerges from an ongoing discussion between Vermeir, Heiremans and Rosamond about the concept of the financial gaze and a desire to develop non-representational parameters for understanding the aesthetics of finance and their implications for contemporary art. Emily Rosamond is a Canadian artist, writer and educator. She is Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Joint Programme Leader on the BA Fine Art & History of Art. She completed her PhD in 2016 as a Commonwealth Scholar in Art at Goldsmiths; her thesis examined the roles that literary, philosophical and moralistic concepts of character play with respect to contemporary art and, more broadly, to newly ubiquitous forms of social control: big data, nudging in corporate and governmental policy, the reputation economy (fuelled, in part, by World 3.0 businesses such as Airbnb), and credit scoring. Recent publications have appeared in Paragrana (2016), Finance and Society (2016), and Liverpool University Press (2017). 
 n.w.w.n.n.l.n.o. is a temporary art space run by artist Guillaume Clermont, as part of his PhD at the Universite libre de Bruxelles, in collaboration with ecole de recherche graphique. Saturday, 9th September, 2017 from 
7-9 pm

 (screening for a small group of guests)