Like many financial concepts, the words ‘debt’ and ‘credit’ are often seen as removed from daily life, relegated to the realm of the academic and economic. However, a description of debt and credit as an abstract financial relationship between two parties effaces the ways in which they shape the material reality of an individual, community or nation. Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst’s (GAK) new exhibition You Breathe Differently Under the Weight. Debt and Credit and accompanying symposium, DEBT. Unsettling Matters of Interest, in Bremen, attempts to overturn this normative understanding of debt. Through a series of works spanning the personal and international, humorous and sombre, realist and absurdist, the group show aims to uncover the multi-layered and often invisible ways in which debt and credit impact our lives, environment and ideas of relationality. The exhibition will be on view at GAK Bremen from June 7 - September 7, 2025.

Late South African artist Santu Mofokeng’s photographs from the Landscapes and Memories series depict debt as a tangible part of the Namibian landscape as a result of German colonialism. They show a railway built by South African war prisoners to contribute to an extractive German economy and highlight how ‘neutral’ financial constructs like debt are leveraged in service of racist, colonial violence. The German Iranian political scientist Natascha Nassir-Shahnian continues this thread in her video essay, depicting embankments constructed in North Frisia, Germany, using money extracted from Namibia. Both works depict the material nature of debt and its manifestations in history, geography and heritage. While they both draw on their personal experiences and surroundings, the scope of these works is grand—elucidating how debt is used as a tool in international politics.

Contemporary artist Toon Fibbe’s video installation, Lady Credit or Finance in Drag (2023) exposes the absurdity of debt, calling into question its authority by removing it from its financial context and placing it within a queer, irreverent narrative. Fibbe plays a chorus of men dressed in clothing from the 1700s, fawning over Lady Credit herself (also played by Fibbe), telling the story of the time’s markets, a precursor to modern ones. Looking through a gendered lens also raises questions about debt’s link with morality and the patriarchal feminisation of positions of indebtedness. In Proudhon, the Society of December 10th and Club of Bad Debtors, German artist Alice Creischer examines the economic, political and intellectual nature of debt using the unlikely form of a puppet show. This diversity of approaches and tones was an early choice by curators Annette Hans and Susanne Huber, who said in conversation with STIR, “The exhibition does not tell one story about debt, it does not seek explanatory containment. It aims to work through debt’s many interconnected layers and situatedness.”

To question the self-evidence of debt and credit and bring them from the abstract to the material, many artists use physical currency as their medium. The German artist collective Jochen Schmith highlights the privatisation of parks in their work Picnic Blankets (2018), made out of shredded banknotes. At the symposium, Ibrahim Kombarji creates an evocative depiction of Lebanon’s sovereign debt crisis by showing bundles of banknotes now holding almost no value. Canadian artist Moyra Davey’s use of corroded pennies and stamps in her artwork opens up discussions about the circulation of money and, therefore, power in society. The focus on materiality in these artworks is highly political. According to the curators, “Debt is highly tangible in materials, bodies and landscapes. Materialised indebtedness and the fact that many debts are actually unpayable leave a multitude of traces…Reducing debt to numbers, financial terms and transactions obscures these effects.”

The exhibition and symposium aim to create a space to have an intersectional conversation about the material impact of debt, to question its assumed inevitability and imagine possibilities for survival and community under debt regimes. American-Canadian artist Lili Huston-Herterich explores debt on the individual, situated level in her video work The Treasury (2024). She draws on the story of an impoverished artist who lives in an abandoned bank building for decades, questioning who has access to economic growth. The effect of debt and credit on artists has broader implications for contemporary art. Hans and Huber recall, “Talking about money in art still comes close to a taboo, at least in rather institutional contexts. For us, it proved challenging to secure funding for the project. More established funders were hesitant, as if the project was somewhat alien, or even improper to art.” This taboo is something the symposium aims to address, highlighting the close links between the art world and capitalist ideas of property, value and interest.

‘You Breathe Differently Under the Weight. Debt and Credit’ will be on view at the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst in Bremen, Germany, from June 7 - September 7, 2025.