‘Nothing For Sale Except Nothing Itself’
Saturday the 27th November 2010 is ‘Buy Nothing Day’ and as part of ‘b-ART-er’ a Contemporary Art exhibition, Michael Bold has been commissioned to create a work responding to the site, an empty shop.
Financial crisis, economic downturn, cuts, student fees, recession, welfare benefits, and so on are words that bombard us daily.
We are led to believe that there is ‘nothing’ left, but is this forced austerity just media and political propaganda? Is there really ‘nothing’ left? Or are we all being brainwashed?
Bold’s work invites visitors to trade from an empty shop, to take a signed perspex box full of nothing, in exchange for a photograph of them leaving the shop with it. This evidence will be used as a record of the transaction. As the boxes diminish they are replaced by a wall of individual images, portraits of the eclectic range of individuals who seek to buy nothing.
Bold has also created a film of the construction and de-construction of just one box. Is he referring to the masses of empty shops that litter our high streets? The lack of manufacture within the UK?, Or perhaps the empty promises we hear from MP’s before they are elected?
“Come on! We’re all in this together”
The empty shop opens on 25th November and runs until 28th November, 1st floor of the Pavilions Shopping Centre, 38 High Street, Birmingham, B4 7SL
