The Financial Report

The Financial Report draws on questions surrounding how artists are impacted by and attempt to reveal and subvert the complex mechanisms of monetary systems, while acknowledging the impossibility of comprehensively averting the permeating influences of these systems. The exhibition takes form as a selective survey of strategies through which artists set out to draw attention to and, in some instances, undermine the ubiquity of their, and implicitly, our involvement and complicity in propelling and advancing capitalist systems.

Intrinsic within some of the projects are questions that extend beyond simple gestures of decrying capitalism to tease out more complicated questions of ethics arising out of and permeating through contemporary art and the markets that form around and in support of it. The project acknowledges the accelerated art markets of Europe and North America but centres on the specific context of Australia and what it means to participate in a cultural field that arguably precludes its primary producers from financial security.