Barbara Kruger does not make images that want to be viewed quietly. Her work speaks back. It interrupts, corrects, accuses, questions, refuses and forces the viewer to take a position. That is the power of her visual language: she uses the tools of advertising, magazines, posters and mass communication not to sell desire, but to expose power. Kruger was born in 1945 in Newark, New Jersey, and is an American conceptual artist and collagist. She is associated with feminism and the Pictures Generation, a group of artists who, from the 1970s and 1980s onward, worked critically with existing images from media, advertising and popular culture. Her work is instantly recognisable: black-and-white photography, forceful text, often in white letters on red...
Annelies Nuy is currently developing Post-Colonial Gold, a research project at the intersection of art, fashion, and value systems. The project examines the shift of gold from a carrier of meaning in pre-colonial cultures to its current role as an economic instrument embedded within systems of power, ownership, and global distribution. In pre-colonial contexts, gold functioned within spiritual, social, and relational systems. During colonial expansion, this meaning was replaced by a model based on extraction, accumulation, and control. Post-Colonial Gold makes this shift explicit and places the historical meaning of gold in contrast with another understanding of value. From gold to meaning Where gold once represented connection, ritual, and collective meaning, it was reduced within the colonial system to ownership...
