Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Think of it as Money

Image caption
ADRIà JULIà

Think of it as Money

  • 2023
  • 4 silver gel prints
  • 90 x 120,5 cm each
  • Cat. F_491
  • Acquired in 2023
By:
Adrià Julià

The series Think of it as Money explores the history of Visa’s ‘white dove’ image, which first featured on its travellers' cheques in 1978 and was adopted in 1984 as a security hologram for the company’s credit cards.

This iconic image of a dove in flight, previously associated with peace and freedom, was repurposed by Visa as part of this new form of payment, to represent the struggle against fraud and counterfeiting. The photo was one of over a hundred taken at a studio in 1978 of a real white dove with its legs tied together. The series Think of it as Money retrieves the discarded images from that session of the tied white dove flapping its wings uncomfortably. Using analogue and digital processes the project gradually transforms those images, superimposing them on series of numbers and plastic credit card landscapes. The combination of analogue and digital photography used to create the series hints at the shift from cash to electronic payment methods, which began at around the same time as the first experiments in digital photography.

The title is a reference to one of the first TV commercials for Visa cards, which encouraged viewers to think of credit cards as money.

Adrià Julià

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Adrià Julià
Barcelona 1974

Adrià Julià studied Fine Arts at Barcelona University (1997) and completed post-graduate studies at the Hochschule der Künste (Berlin, Germany, 2000), where he was a student of Rebecca Horn, and at the California Institute of the Arts. He lives in Los Angeles.

His work, which usually draws on films, installations, performances, photography and printed materials, questions the concept of truth linked to history, arguing that there are many stories in a story, that there is no single interpretation. He is particularly interested in the way of generating tales, of building images and film. He studies the limits between the documentary and the theatrical by conducting a fragmented re-reading of the real. He recovers its traces and its footprints for his account of what happened. Documents with no nostalgic values are questioned by providing different readings of the same event, so that he re-reads the past as he seeks to connect it with the present in the form of a choral discourse.

Adrià Julià has had solo shows at the Palau de la Virreina (Barcelona, 2004); the Sala Rekalde (Bilbao, 2005); the Artists Space (New York, 2005); the Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, USA, 2006); the Tamayo Museum (Mexico City, 2010); the Soledad Lorenzo Gallery (Madrid, 2005 and 2010); and the Joan Miró Foundation (Barcelona, 2015). He took part in the Lyon Biennial (France, 2007), the Mercosur Biennial (Porto Alegre, Brasil, 2009) and the São Paulo Biennial (2010). He has received the Arte y Derecho Foundation Grant (2000); the Altadis Prize (2002); a Prize from the California Community Foundation (2010); and the Visual Arts Grant from the Botín Foundation (2015).

Isabel Tejeda

 
«Think of it As Money!», CAC Contemporary Arts Center (Irvine (California - USA), 2023).