The Greater G8 Advertising Market Stand, 2007–2009

Zambian-born artist Anawana Haloba trained at both the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo and at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Spanning different media, from video to interactive installations, Haloba’s work comes to grip with the constant redefinition of cultures and individual and collective memory in the global fluxes of symbolic and economic values.

The Greater G8 Advertising Market Stand, originally realized at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and then on show at the 53rd Venice Biennale, parodies the possibility of fair and enlarged “free trade.” This interactive installation consists of a typical- looking roadside vendor selling organic and eco-friendly products from Moldova, Iraq, Sudan, Colombia, Bolivia, Malawi, the Philippines, and Somalia. While the goods are advertised as “Bolivian Organic Soybeans” or “Vigobe Corn Flakes: A Malawian product not genetically modified,” their substance betrays their promises. When the visitor opens the different boxes, he actually finds only Western industrial candies. In a kind of semiotic short-circuit between expression and content, the artist denounces the hollowness of political slogans announcing a better world. (SG)