Post-Capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age

Funded: Katja Novitskova, Simon Denny, Oliver Laric, Joséphine Pryde

'Post-Capital' brings together works of sculpture, painting, photography, video and performance that address the nature of production, consumption and wealth. The exhibition has been developed at a time of significant change and fundamental uncertainty. Its starting point is the inherent paradox within a capitalist system that is both dependent upon and threatened by technological progress.

The exhibition takes its title from a 1993 book, 'Post-Capitalist Society'. This book predicted that the impact of information technology on the labour market would be so great that it would ultimately lead to the fall of capitalism by 2020. Published whilst the internet was still in its infancy (Luxembourg, for example, was connected in 1992), it predicted that in the future, knowledge, rather than capital, labour or land ownership, would become the basis for wealth.

Today forms of labour, currency, commodities and the nature of consumption have been dramatically transformed by technologies that continue to evolve. Multinational information technology and e-commerce firms are amongst the highest valued publicly traded companies. Information that is both abundant and infinitely replicable has become a valuable commodity that defies traditional economic principles whereby value is determined by scarcity.

'Post-Capital' presents works by twenty-one artists that variously explore the aesthetics, paradoxes, absurdities and ethical questions posed by post-industrial and perhaps post-capital economies.

This exhibition is supported by the ifa Exhibition Funding.