The Deal, 2013

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The Deal stemmed from my experience as an artist living and working in Istanbul where there are no art production funds and arts infrastructure is weak. I thus thought I can use this lack of financial support in order to expose the mentality of finance, entrepreneurship and art.

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I asked my gallery to get a 5,000 Turkish Lira loan from a bank; told them that it was for production costs; and once they secured the loan and gave it to me, I gave it to a trader. With the trader we signed an agreement: if the trader makes a profit of above 18-months’ interest on the loan within a month only through speculation, he takes all the money, including the principal, if not, I take all the money. Either way, it ends up with an artwork being offered to the market and valued by the ambiguous mechanisms of the art market. The artwork produced during this process is operating without any concrete production; merely circulating money and triggering a desire.

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The documents of the process are exhibited as an installation: the deal between the artist and the trader, the video showing the circulation of money (bank to gallery, gallery to artist, artist to trader, collector to gallery, gallery to bank, and so on), a second video showing the trader at work and a diagram explaining the process.