Europe

Goldin+Senneby

Headless (Fiction on auction)

2007-2009

Goldin+Senneby, Headless (Fiction on auction), 2007-2009. Performance.

In Headless (Fiction on Auction), the site of the auction is used to stage a fiction where the right to appear as character in Looking for Headless is offered to the highest bidder: the name of the successful biddder as registered for the auction will form the name or identity of the character appearing in the novel.

Looking for Headless is written by the fictitious author K.D and tells the story of two artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby who collaborate with an author, John Barlow. Goldin and Senneby investigate an offshore company on the Bahamas called Headless Ltd whilst Barlow writes a docu-fictional murder-mystery, also called Headless, based on these investigations. The three protagonists become increasingly entangled in the world of offshore business, while speculating about the possible connections between Headless Ltd and the secret society known as Acéphale ( from the Greek term, acephalus, meaning headless) founded by George Bataille and his circle of friends connected to the College de Sociologie in Paris in the late 1930s.

Goldin and Senneby have created a series of exhibition projects in parallel with Looking for Headless which examine elements of the novel, including the identity of Headless Ltd, and explore the juridical construction of off-shore financial centres as strategies of withdrawal from public visibility.

Fiction on Auction is the 4th project in Offer and Exchange: Sites of Negotiation in Contemporary Art (2008-2010): a series of site specific commissions curated by Daniel McClean & Lisa Rosendahl.

Since 2004, the artists Goldin+Senneby, comprised of Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby, have been working on an ongoing performative and rhizomatic project. Headless Ltd is the name of an offshore company located in the Bahamas that Goldin+Senneby appears to be researching. An investigation that allows them to analyze the virtuality of the financial, economic, and legal fabric and its impact on the reality of our contemporary society. The creation of these offshore spaces is described as a strategy of withdrawal from the public sphere, the secret place of a possible fiction. This project takes shape through the intervention of different people such as Angus Cameron, an English geographer and economist, or John Burlow, whom the artists hired to write a detective fiction Looking for Headless - this documentary novel is written as the project evolves. It is therefore a fiction based on real facts: the places, the societies and the characters exist. We discover both the world of offshore companies and the different forms of presentation of the project. Like the “withdrawal” made by these offshore companies in the real economy, the artists do not appear publicly. They are represented in turn by actors, an author, economic specialists, or exhibition curators. The role of the artist-author deliberately escapes them.

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Goldin+Senneby Headless (Fiction on auction)

Goldin+Senneby

Headless (Fiction on auction)