Portikus
Time/Bank
May 7–June 26, 2011
Opening: May 6, 2011
Portikus is delighted to announce that starting May 6, it will become a bank: a time bank.
Initiated by artists Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle in 2009, Time/Bank, is a platform that enables people to get things done without using money. With more than a thousand account holders around the world, Time/Bank allows groups and individuals to pool and trade their time, and acquire goods and services using credits earned by helping others in the bank. Through Time/Bank, we hope to create an immaterial currency and a parallel micro-economy for the cultural community, one that will create a sense of worth for many of the exchanges that already take place within our field.
At Portikus, the Time/Bank will be comprised of four main components: a Time/Store offering a range of commodities, groceries, and articles of daily use, as well as a selection of artist’s editions and books produced by Portikus; an exhibition of artists’ designed prototypes for a time based currency; a currency mint which will print and put in circulation four hundred one Hour Notes - one for each hour of the exhibition; an archive of Notgelt—the legendary German alternative currency popular during the hyperinflation of 1920s.
Time/Bank at Portikus will host a series of public seminars and talks by the theorist and activist Franco Berardi (Bifo), Paul Glover, founder of Ithaca Hours local currency system, anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli from Columbia University, and artists Raqs Media Collective.
The Frankfurt branch of Time/Bank will include a network of local art institutions and organizations, such as the MMK and the Jewish Museum amongst others, where the currency of the Time/Bank—Hour Notes, designed by the American artist Lawrence Weiner-—can be used for admission, and to make purchases in cafeterias and books stores.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Portikus is pleased to publish a book dealing with qualities of time, gift economy, alternative currencies and other related topics, including commissioned essays and illustrations, as well as contributions by the members of Time/Bank.
Job opportunities:
Time/Bank is currently hiring Time/Store clerks. Salary: one Hour Note per hour.
Since 2003, Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle have been frequent collaborators on numerous art projects, including e-flux video rental: an art work in the form of a free video rental shop, which started in New York in 2004 and has since travelled to art centers throughout the world including KW, Berlin, Extra City, Antwerp, Portikus, Frankfurt, Lyon Biennial, Gulbekian Foundation, Lisbon and many other. In 2007, Aranda and Vidokle opened Pawnshop: a pawnshop for art which went bankrupt in New York at the onset of the global economic crisis in 2008 to reopened a year later at Vitamin Creative Space in Beijing, China. Together with Brian Kuan Wood, Arand and Vidokle are co-editors of e-flux journal.
For more information please contact: