Everything revolves around money: returnable bottles are collected, a rubber glove is worn, or a mobile phone is now ubiquitously used to pay at check-out. Yet money is more than just coins and bills, or a digital bank balance. Since its inception, money has shaped our perceptions of the world and quantifies what and who is considered valuable. How much should a banana, a T-shirt, a flat, someone’s labour, or a lifespan cost?
The Priceless – Money, Power, Values exhibition examines how money shapes us, our history and our world – and at whose expense. It links the origins of money to questions of power and social structures, using objects from the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) collections to tell the story of global interconnections and personal fates within the context of shifts in value. Identified as a forgery, a Mayan stucco head loses its value as an antiquity but gains a new one as a research subject. Cocoa beans have evolved from a historical currency to a global foodstuff. Returnable bottles are rubbish for some while being a necessary source of additional income for others.