Melanie Gilligan: "If The Market Say's You're In Trouble, You're In Trouble"

As a follow-up to the recent lecture given by Melanie Gilligan on systemic conditions and particular subjective experience bureau publik will screen three of Gilligan’s serial videos reflecting on the financial crisis and the current state of politics in the midst of capital’s ongoing crisis.

The first video work Crisis in the Credit System (2008), a four-part fictional mini drama, takes its starting point at a role-playing session arranged by an investment bank. The employees are asked to come up with different strategies responding to the current financial crisis. However as the role-play progress the scenarios become more and more absurd and grotesque, and the participants find themselves drawing alarming conclusions about the consequences of the crisis and its effects beyond the world of finance.

In Self Capital (2009) a personified Global Economy undergoes a radical body-oriented therapeutic treatment for a psychological condition caused by her recent meltdown and in Gilligan’s most recent video work Popular Unrest (2010) a system called ‘the Spirit’ oversees all exchange transactions and social interactions, while a vast number of unexplained killings have broken out across the globe and mysterious groups of unrelated people are suddenly coming together. Both videos suggest that effects of the crisis and the dominating needs of capital are felt on a material and corporeal level, but also that psychological and political subjects are increasingly reduced to a bodily materiality today. 

Structured like short TV-style episodes the videos take their cue from television, and by using fiction to communicate what is left out of documentary accounts of the current crisis the work not only critically point to the lack of any questioning of the fundamental dependency on capitalism in either mainstream media and politics. But more importantly reflect on the strangeness of our lives today in which the financial abstractions that govern our lives appear to be disintegrating.

Melanie Gilligan is an artist and writer based in London and New York. Her work as an artist incorporates a variety of media including video, performance, text, installation and music but her particular focus in recent years has been on writing and directing narrative video works and performances, using these media as experimental means of thinking through practice.