International symposium and group exhibition 22 - 23 May / 7 June - 7 September 2025

An initiative of the University of Bremen and GAK Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst Bremen, in co-operation with University of Oldenburg and Hochschule für Künste Bremen/TemporarySpaces

How debt affects bodies, organisms, relationships and feelings as well as the environment and infrastructures is often obscured by financial abstractions and moralising. The symposium and the group exhibition shift the perspective to how debts inscribe themselves into histories, memories, identities and environments and constantly reshape them.

The boom in debt in political discourse is closely linked to changes in global power relations and changing environmental conditions; models of permanent growth now define debt-based investments as a prerequisite for the ability to produce. This suggests an expansion, or even escalation, of the conceptual analogy between artistic production and a financialised present, which Marina Vishmidt and others identified in the motif of speculation.

Following Leigh Claire LaBerge's rejection of an "increasing abstraction" of utilisation processes, the symposium therefore explores the social and cultural productivity of debt. The contributions trace the significance of property, value and interest as parallel moments of debt and art since modernism in a speculative present along the intersections of "bodies", "ecologies" and "infrastructures". Instead of explaining them, the symposium aims at an expanded understanding of debt as a formative structure of calculated realities.

Further information can be found here.