Capital[’s]Punishment explores the implicit violence of the expression: “Your home may be repossessed if you do not keep up repayments on your mortgage”, a phrase that is present in every mortgage advertising in the UK and the USA.

Explicitly available in the public space and yet unseen (in small letters), the phrase discloses the secret of the market system: capital always claims property back. The appealing nature of the text is that it makes no secret of the hermeneutic contradiction of capitalism: it is based on generating and promoting private property at large, but it can only keep doing it through an act of future repossession.

Capital[’s]Punishment is my own rewriting of the text, an effort to show the contradiction of how we live, where property appears as the only place for existence, autonomy and freedom, though that place is from its beginning doomed to crumble.

Capital’s Punishment (2012)
Installation
Neon sign, slide projection, and a series of screenprints on paper
Variable dimensions
Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany.