Niko Abramidis &NE, Big Roll 1000 Yen, 2025

2025

Medium

Textile printing, foam and styrofoam

Dimensions

45 × 45 cm

Edition

Edition of 25

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-156263

With the “Big Rolls“ series, Niko Abramidis &NE takes up an object that is steadily disappearing from everyday life: cash. As digital payment systems increasingly replace physical banknotes, money is losing the material quality that once made it a carrier of traces — an individual testimony to circulating lives. Banknotes accumulate marks of use, pass from hand to hand, and absorb stories. When bundled into a roll, they condense into a symbol of national economy, value, power, and wealth. The “Big Rolls“ translate this motif into sculptural enlargement. By scaling up and rolling the banknote, its imagery is intensified and its symbolic force quite literally blown up. The work oscillates between object and prop: it is sculpture, seating, and stage element at once. The possibility of “sitting on money” ironically fulfills an archetypal desire, while simultaneously exposing the absurdity of economic magnitudes — those unimaginable sums bound within financial systems or mobilized in times of global crisis. Each edition varies in the color of the rubber band as well as in small drawn interventions on the banknotes, subtly individualizing what is otherwise a standardized, state-authorized means of exchange. Every Big Roll thus becomes a unique object. The new edition is based on the Japanese 1000-yen note featuring the iconic wave by Katsushika Hokusai. “The Great Wave off Kanagawa“ appears here as an image deeply embedded in collective memory. On the banknote, the wave seems both meditative and powerful — a sublime natural phenomenon that is neither overtly threatening nor entirely serene. In today’s context, it inevitably invites associations: with climate change, with ecological tipping points, with the paradoxical entanglement of capital and systemic catastrophe. Abramidis is less interested in a fixed interpretation than in the layered nature of symbols. The banknote is already a highly charged emblem. Through enlargement and rolling, its symbolic dimension is further intensified and monumentalized. The wave depicted on a circulating means of payment becomes, in the Big Roll, an almost spatially expansive image. It intuitively gestures toward contemporary tensions between economy and nature without spelling them out didactically. Like all works in the series, this edition carries an ambivalent, almost virtual character. The monumental money roll appears like a relic from a time when cash was physically bundled — comparable to an oversized floppy disk in a fully digitized world. It is at once nostalgic and contemporary, concrete and symbolic. It is precisely in this openness that the work’s strength lies. The Big Roll does not require a singular reading. It operates through suggestion, through the intuitive recognition of its multiple layers. Between capital, catastrophe, and aesthetic seduction, it unfolds as an image that feels both timeless and strikingly attuned to the present moment.