Nome is pleased to announce artist duo Goldin+Senneby’s first solo show in Berlin.

Secrets of Trade presents key works from Goldin+Senneby’s recent interrogations of financial trading, the art market, and artificial intelligence. The artistic collaborators’ projects conceptualize ways in which these three powerful engines are entwined; how they at turns shape and respond to contemporary society while operating at a mysterious remove from the general public.

Goldin+Senneby’s practice – often involving elements of outsourcing, performance, and collaboration with experts – could be said to enact this same mystique. Their artworks uncover something of the shrouded relationships between art and money, while also spinning further fictions from them.

An antique money changers’ table is broken in two, a visual realization of the word for “bankruptcy”, which derives from the the Italian for broken bench, banca rotta. Abacuses surround a magic box filled with information about short selling and insider trading. Algorithms trained on art market data generate correlation maps (Force Directed Predictions), which visualize art price fluctuations they relate to macro political and economic indicators such as employment rates and literacy. A series of confidential trading strategies, acquired by the artists in exchange for artworks, are bound in files with cover illustrations by the designer Johan Hjerpe, which visually interpret the main dynamics of the strategic content. The tricks of the trade remain sealed in glass boxes, out of access yet performing as art.

Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby have worked as a duo since 2004, speculating on the layerings of contemporary economics via ideas of the virtual and performance. Their ghostwritten detective novel Headless (2015) narrates investigations into offshore businesses, and their recent work focuses on experiments in theatrical finance. Solo exhibitions include: “Standard Length of a Miracle”, Tensta konsthall, Stockholm (2016) and IMA, Brisbane (2017); “The Decapitation of Money”, Kadist, Paris (2010); and “Headless”, The Power Plant, Toronto (2008). Group exhibitions include: “Manipulate the World”, Moderna museet, Stockholm (2017); “The Eighth Climate”, 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016); “Art Turning Left”, Tate Liverpool (2013); “Mom, am I barbarian?”, 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013); “The Deep of the Modern”, Manifesta 9 (2012); and “The End of Money”, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2011). Their work is represented in the collections of Moderna museet, Stockholm; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.