Niko Abramidis &NE, Agenda Table (Muc-Manila), 2020

2020

Medium

Steel, screen, glass, steel plate, smartphone dummy, drawing on post-it and Google Earth video loop (27:13 min)

Dimensions

125 × 80 cm

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-155829

The installations of the work series Agenda Tables (ongoing) each imitate a desk, in whose steel-welded frame a large-format screen is embedded under a glass plate as a tabletop. Visualizations and aerial photographs of places are displayed on the screen, through which the artist makes global movements of money flows visible. Centers of power, such as central business districts, but also remote places important to financial companies or global trade, are explored and made spatially tangible through this visual travel. Abramidis &NE repeatedly uses the desk as a place where ideas, negotiations and strategies arise. Objects of a supposed working reality are arranged on the table and put in relation to the respective video. The title Agenda Table (Muc-Manila) refers to two central locations: the prominent scenes of the financial scandal surrounding the Wirecard company are the focus of this work – Munich and Manila. Abramidis &NE visualizes the multi-layered scandal of missing billions and falsified bank documents – a dubious corporate web, possibly corrupt officials, and an ex-manager on the run – by driving around the alleged locations of action with the help of Google Earth. In Munich, for example, the company headquarters can be seen in the anonymous industrial park in Aschheim and in the Philippines, the Central Business District of Manila. The glass plate of the Agenda Table, under which the screen is embedded, serves not only as a functional tabletop – allowing actual desk work – but also, in a figurative sense, as a window or magnifying glass, through which the viewer is given the opportunity to embark on a search for clues in order to look behind the criminal machinations of Wirecard. On the table, next to objects of apparent working reality – a fossilized cell phone as well as a Post-it note – a small rusty sign with the engraving "N€" is placed. "N€" here stands for the artist Niko Abramidis &NE: "The suffix &NE indicates that I am not a private person, but rather act as part of a larger entity. My decisions therefore always depend on management's strategy."