Taya Kabayewa: MAMONYA - sorrynoroomsavailable

MAMONYA
Taya Kabayewa
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Showcase, Hotel Itourist-Zakarpattia

“Do you know who rules in the world? – Mammon. He is the king of the earthly world. This is how it is written in the Bible: you cannot serve both God and Mammon at the same time.

“Pastor I. of the Aven Azer church in Radvanka, head of the Roma church community.

“Capitalism is probably the first case of a cult of guilt, not a cult of remorse. Yes, this religious system is the collapse of a huge movement. A huge sense of guilt is captured in the cult, which does not know how to bring repentance – not in order to repent, but to make this guilt universal, to kill it in the mind, and finally, to include the god himself in this cult, and then to interest him in repentance . This (repentance) cannot be counted on either in the cult itself, or in the reformation of this religion – which must hold on to something certain in itself – or in its denial. In the essence of this religious movement, which is capitalism, lies – until the very end, until the finally complete suggestion of the guilt of God – the achievement of a world of despair, the limit of expectations.

“Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as a Religion, 1921

One of the wonders of War is its ability to transform a singular, incalculable quality into a calculable quantity. And in this ability to convert quality into quantity, the unique into measurable, War is Capital’s sister. Let’s write these words here with capital letters – as the names of deities thirsty for sacrifices. Mamonya from Taia Kabaeva’s installation is a devourer of lives. He is concerned with quantity, he is indifferent to quality. His face is a coin, a universal equivalent, a model of the anti-unique (Benjamin writes about a banknote or a coin as a new icon). He is not a metaphysical evil – rather, in his person, a pragmatic instruction turns into its own opposite. The accumulation and multiplication of capital (this time from a small one) turns into the destruction of any resource base. Mammon reigns on the scorched earth. Taia Kabaeva’s work belongs to the ancient tradition of moralistic and allegorical images of the power of money, to the world of “dances around the golden body” and “capital pyramids”. This work is both burlesque and tragic. Cheap props, literalism of metaphors, Guignol horrors, moral pathos, grotesque generalization – everything is supposedly “out of date”, the image is impropriety incarnate. But this is exactly how it works as a reminder: we are still in the world of Mammon and there are no other worlds.

Author of the text: Nikita Kadan

Exhibition documentation:
Photo credit: Mykhailo Melnychenko