DEBT. (solo exhibition at Tintype Gallery, London)

2017

This installation was first exhibited as part of Zaharia's show ‘DEBT.’ at Tintype Gallery, London, and draws on a year long battle with financial precariousness and its creative implications. Devised as an attempt to shift and subvert the power relationships at play within this process, the works presented use design and visual discourse in order to translate and transform negative figures into something of cultural value and aesthetic gain.

For example, the pair of large wall pieces presented under the title of ‘Negative Space as Things’ depicts a very exaggerated and magnified version of Zaharia's accounting process, in which two pieces of paper were stuck to the living-room wall in an attempt to keep track of all her credit card spending and payments. The two images are meant to be recording and marking down all her financial transactions and undertakings, while at the same time converting any sum of money into an abstract and imaginative object.

‘Comfy Seating and Internet Banking’ is a pair of cinema seats designed to entrap and display Zaharia's and her partner’s own Internet banking devices, employing the concept of the ‘spectacle’ as a metaphor for our relationship with both debt and money.

The ‘Endless Drawing’ is a pictorial and conceptual representation of her balance sheets between 26th June and 23rd August 2017, in which all the numbers and figures have been removed only to reveal a set of abstract circles and annotations referring to any spending connected to the exhibition. Alongside the wall drawing, the piece ‘Bookkeeping’ acts as both a play on words and a visual figuration, alluding to a situation in which ‘keeping ones head above the water’ is the only possible ambition. In this sense, the works submitted function as a very personal and visual account of art making as book-keeping, allowing for a highly poetic and intimate critique around the notion and reality of debt.