What am I doing here in a Stalinistic Disneyland?
A bitterly cold winter’s day. January, 2000. I walk down Minsk’s long parade street, my pockets filled with thick balls of rubles with nice houses on them. Million bills, 100,000 bills, from which three zeros had been removed in a currency reform. A cup of coffee cost a million or two. People in the stores are friendly, and if you stick out a wad of money, the store workers pick out the proper bills for you. The money never runs out. Rich at last. At night, I take a long walk with Denis and look at strange houses. The same houses that were on the money. The hotel’s name is 40 Years of Victory.
At two in the morning I visit a pizzeria where one must go through a metal detector to eat. The guards are war veterans from Afghanistan. There is no point speaking of East and West any more. The world is just as absurd everywhere.
The only thing that matters is money.The situation today is a post-post-post The Wall situation. There is no reason anymore to depersonalize individual artists and make them represent entire political systems and ideologies. There is no ”we,” there is no ”we” which represents Sweden, Russia, Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, or Denmark.
What am doing here?

For the past two years, I have traveled around building up Crac’s international network. The key function of this work has been strengthening and deepening contacts to create a situation with real communication between artists and atrists, artists and audiences, artists and the new media: a way of defending our rights to freedom of speech and press. The freedom of art.
This principle is meaningful in a Russia where media is suddenly being manipulated from above and artists such as Oleg Mavromatti suffer because of it. In Moscow, the police confiscated ten years of his work, and he was forced into exile in Bulgaria because he provoked the Russian-Orthodox church.
History repeats itself. And even though the reality in Stockholm is somewhat different from that in Minsk, we have a common economic history.
Åke Karlung’s work ”Det värdelösa leendet” (The Worthless Smile) talks about the mystical power of gold, the magic metal which woke the desire of Scandinavians over 1000 years ago, causing tham to take over what are now the Baltic states, Belarus, the Ukraine all the way down to Constantinople in search of gold. Which they later took home and buried. There was almost nothing to buy with the gold. Researchers believe that the Scandinavians thought that gold had a mystical light which could light up the realm of Death. The Scandinavian realm of Death was cold and dark. If one buried the gold on a mound, the other side would be light. Gold contained sunrays. This is why they killed so many people.

Money is a commentary on the new in the light of the old. It is an art exhibition by Crac together with the Swedish Institute’s Partnership for Culture. A project which attempts to support freedom of speech and democracy through cultural exchange with above all the Baltic states, Belarus, Russia, and even the Balkans. The exhibition Money is the final installment of the Partnership for Culture, which ends this summer.
Money is also a good beginning.

Nils Claesson

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