A new MoMA: Hito Steyerl – “Liquidity Inc.” (2014)

On Oct. 21, 2019, a newly renovated Museum of Modern Art opened to the public.  These images from the Surrounds: 11 Installations exhibit were captured two weeks prior during a press preview, and the description of the piece was taken from both the actual exhibit and moma.org:

Liquidity Inc. is a multilayered portrait of Jacob Wood, a financial analyst who lost his job in the economic crash of 2008 and became a career mixed-martial-arts fighter. Wood’s story unfolds through real and virtual worlds that are made to overlap, combining conventions of documentary film with Internet syntax—hashtags, GIFs, and memes. With its computer-generated waves and news footage of hurricanes and tsunamis, the work uses water and extreme weather as metaphors for the fluidity of financial assets and digital information, and for a collective sense of instability.

“Conflating terms from meteorology, geopolitics, and digital culture, masked forecasters wryly suggest that weather patterns are determined by our own emotional states. You are invited to sit on the architectural structure, lined with judo mats, which the artist has compared to a raft wrecked by a raging storm.”