Real Flow was a R&D project focusing on finance and art. It was a collaboration between Diann Bauer, Victoria Ivanova, Christopher Kulendran-Thomas and Suhail Malik in 2015 culminating in and exhibition at P! in New York.
Real Flow offered tailor-made financial solutions for contemporary art by crossing the now wholly permeable and artificially-maintained barriers between art’s markets, markets in general, and art’s flexible and porous semantics. Re-engineering the artwork’s commodity form, this venture tactically integrated art into its diverse channels of exhibition, circulation, and marketization. Financialization’s futurity was operationalized by Real Flow to reconstitute art’s future present and open up new vistas through and beyond capital.
Real Flow
The changing future is difficult to predict. But, for all the unknown complexities exposed through economic crisis, one thing is increasingly certain: our planet has become fully engulfed by the volatility of finance and its constant state of risk. This hegemonic order is no longer driven by objectives of progress or development but rather by the management of the perpetual present of risk-opportunity.
The process of sublimation whereby capitalism melts ‘all that is solid... into air’ requires a phase transition. Many biological systems are continually poised close to a critical point where numerous interacting components can tip the system's organization from one global state to another. As a species, we are evolving past Cartesian confinement. Our bodies no longer define our limits. Technological upgrades on human senses pave the way to new dimensions of evolutionary adaptation so that tangibility can transcend Earth-bound experience.
The ocean may reconnect us with primordial fluidity, yet it is air that offers the ultimate realm of possibility. Air reconstitutes power from body-wielding mechanisms to morphable energy. Unhindered by the viscosities of liquid, air overcomes terrestrial friction towards a future more sublime than capitalism can afford.
Beyond liquidity is air. Beyond capital is our future.
Real Flow ia a collaboration between Diann Bauer, Victoria Ivanova, Christopher Kulendran-Thomas and Suhail Malik for R&D of finance and art.
PDF of the prospectus outlining the details of the project: