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"Money, money, money / Must be funny / In a rich man's world". I'd be willing to bet that everyone reading these words simultaneously hears the tune of the world-famous ABBA hit. It doesn't matter whether you come from Sweden or from Burkina Faso, Japan or Venezuela; most likely you can immediately sing the refrain of this cheerful classic. It's the sort of universal music that is equally easy on the ear - and equally meaningless - to everyone in the world. That is not true of another universal concept : money. Money is not at all meaningless or neutral. Everyone wants it but for someone in Burkina Faso it means something different (and presumably has a different urgency) than for someone in Sweden.
Meschac Gaba, an artist from Benin living and working in Amsterdam for the past two years, is fascinated by money. A fascination closely related to the economic crisis in his native land and neighbouring countries in Africa. It all began when Gaba, wandering one day through the streets of Porto Novo, discovered a trash can full of shredded bank notes behind a bank building. Confronted daily with the harrowing effects of lack of money, he suddenly saw how this selfsame valuable stuff is simply cut up and thrown away. Meschac Gaba decided then and there to incorporate shredded bank notes - those 'vouchers' of the absurdity of our world economy - in his artworks.
In his first works, the emphasis appears in particular to be on the formal, pictorial quality of the bank notes. The works he made on canvas all contain stamp-like imprints of organic forms which, because of the subdued ochre colours of Benin's paper currency, are most reminiscent of the leaves of trees in varying...