On value 

MOMENTA x Dazibao

On May 29, 2025 at 7 pm

MOMENTA is launching a brand-new cycle of video screenings. The first session is presented in collaboration with Dazibao and curated by the artist and exhibition curator Ella den Elzen under the title On Value. This inaugural screening offers a reflection on the theme of capital and the malleability of value, through a selection of works by contemporary international video artists.

Program

 — Moyra Davey, Hell Notes (1990/2017) — 26 min. 16 sec.

 — Dora Budor & Noah Barker, Chase Manhattan (2021-2022) — 10 min. 32 sec.

 — Dora Budor & Noah Barker, Orange Film II (2023) — 4 min. 7 sec.

 — Nandi Loaf, thê ABSOLUTE RECKONING: plot device – minimal derivative symbol impulse* (2024) — 9 min. 30 sec.

 — Vera Lutz, The Happiness Experiment (2025) — 3 min. 59 sec.

 — Hannah Black, Broken Windows (2022) — 15 min. 30 sec.

An event not to be missed to immerse yourself in powerful visual narratives at the intersection of fiction, essay, and experimentation.

On Value

Each of the selected moving image works deals with the specific malleability of value. As a series, the films examine capital’s meaning and its mutations across contexts. Beginning with Hell Notes (1990/2017) by Moyra Davey, which directly takes money and currency as its subject, the films in On Value by Dora Budor and Noah Barker, Nandi Loaf, Vera Lutz and Hannah Black explore alternative definitions of value related to cultural capitalism, commodities, the art market, and nothingness.

In a sequence from Moyra Davey’s Hell Notes, we view Manhattan’s skyline from a tour boat while listening to its guide declare that the Woolworth Building was once nicknamed the “Cathedral of Commerce”, a suggestion to the divine union between capital and God. Davey draws a parallel between money and excrement, as theorized by Sigmund Freud, stating that humans value money because we value the things outside of ourselves, or more emphatically – “our shit”. Shot on Super 8 mm film, Hell Notes captures views of New York City, where the artist had recently relocated from Montreal, including its monumental bedrock and the financial vaults into which they are carved.

Dora Budor and Noah Barker explore the relationships between financial capital and the built environment in Chase Manhattan (2021-2022) and Orange Film II (2023). Shot on a hand-held camera from a moving vehicle, Chase Manhattan is composed of stills scored with contrasting soundtracks by Stubborn and KVANTUM. The chase follows a dump truck carrying the metal armature and steel beams of a demolished skyscraper which formerly occupied 270 Park Avenue, from midtown Manhattan, through the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey. JP Morgan Chase (the largest financial institution in the United States) is the absent protagonist of this dérive, whose deconstruction of a Modernist skyscraper allowed for the creation of its new headquarters on the same site.

In Budor and Barker’s Orange Film II, images reflected within a large mirrored sculpture in Tribeca are abstracted by the film’s means of production: a hand-held camera rigged to shoot through a glass of orange wine. Producing a coloring reminiscent of the sepia-toned films of the 19th century, materially, the orange wine connotes a specific taste, insisting on the viewer’s position behind the literal lens of class and culture. Cultural capital and art are frequently mobilized by real estate developers, city planners and architects to generate speculation around new development projects. The specific sculpture in this film is wedged beneath 56 Leonard, a luxury condominium designed by so-called ‘starchitects’, whose residences have reportedly nearly doubled in value over the last four years.

Nandi Loaf’s thê ABSOLUTE RECKONING : plot device- minimal derivative symbol impulse* (2024) is both an homage to John Cage’s 4’ 33” and an exploration of the ways in which an artist and their production become a singular subject. Depicting the artist staring into the camera for the same length of time as Cage’s composition, Loaf’s work complicates the associations of value produced through art making. Through this reductive gesture, she refutes the prescription of the artist’s role to perform, while simultaneously commodifying her own image as an artwork. Additionally drawing upon Fluxus and Dada strategies, such as disrupting the viewer through an oscillation between withholding and overloading information, Loaf looks to, in her own words, “orchestrate this collapse between artist and object, work and product, capital and art. This oblique reversal here again directs to the odd effect of creating nothing”.

Vera Lutz’s The Happiness Experiment (2025) conveys two sides of desire, conflating discarded material goods with projections of fantasy or longing. An illusory scene unfolds vis-à- vis the movement of tunnels of light, whose shifting illumination produces an unstable quality similar to memory or one’s interior subconscious. Luminosity brings form to the formless, revealing piles of commodities and everyday objects through the juxtaposition of bright and dark. Value within the film takes on the term's dual meaning within film and economics: the simultaneous absence and presence of light not only reveals but constructs each frame, generating a fleeting series of still-lifes. Initially conceptualized as a sculptural video installation, The Happiness Experiment is presented as a stand-alone film at MOMENTA Biennale for the first time, while a newly commissioned multi-channel installation of the work is concurrently on view at Kunstverein München.

Broken Windows (2022) by Hannah Black follows the dialogue of three young women who were present during the 2020 protests that followed sustained acts of police violence in the United States. Presented as a set of interviews, the accumulation of their accounts builds a fragmented narrative about an instant when the protests transformed into rioting and looting. Their commentary suggests how participation in these actions became a momentary interruption into the capitalist systems of control that dominate their city, thus briefly negating the material value of commodities. Each protagonist’s face is redacted by the artist, covered with a circular image of plywood — the same material used to board up the windows of luxury boutiques during the fervent political intensity of that summer. Other identifying details are obscured by the sound of police sirens, allowing censorship to serve as a method of circumventing laws that would otherwise criminalize the people in the work.

— Ella den Elzen

Moyra Davey (b. 1958, Montreal) creates writing, photography and moving-image to merge the everyday with discursive references from theory, literature, and history. Her films frequently employ monologues as narration, conflating personal narratives with explorations of language and the interior, of both the artist and figures she studies. Recent screenings of Davey’s films have taken place at Judy’s Death, Paris (2024), the Berlinale – Internationale Filmfestspiele, Berlin (2023) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022). Davey is the author of several publications, most recently, The Shabbiness of Beauty (2021), Index Cards (2020), and Hemlock Forest (2016); she also contributed to the recent English translation of Suzanne and Louise by Hervé Guibert (2024). Davey lives and works in New York.

Dora Budor (b. 1984, Zagreb) and Noah Barker (b. 1991, California) live and work in New York. In their films, Budor and Barker trace psychogeographic resonances spawning from sites of development and social life. Each film retains a sense of genre, while narrative recedes to privilege movement and texture. They have shown collaborative video works at MoMA PS1, New York (2024); Sgomento Zurigo, Zurich (2024); Simian, Copenhagen (2023); Établissement d'en face, Brussels (2023); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2022); Fluentum, Berlin (2021-22); and The Wig, Berlin.

Working across installation, sculpture, paintings, prints and performance, Nandi Loaf (b. 1991, New York) examines the role of the artist and means of artistic production through a self-constructed identity entitled ‘Nandi Loaf: the artist’. Through carefully mediated and choreographed encounters, Loaf establishes herself as the subject of her work, as a critical methodology of revealing the circulation of cultural and financial capital within the art world. Recent solo and duo presentations include King’s Leap, New York (2024), Profil Paris (2024), and Sebastian Gladstone, Los Angeles (2023). Nandi Loaf is an artist living and working in the 21st century.

Vera Lutz (b. 1992, Munich) works across sculpture, installation, and moving-image, often taking the physical conditions of the exhibition space as a starting point for her work. Recent exhibitions include a two-person show with Simon Lässig at Kunstverein Munich (2025), a group show at Raven Row London (2025) and solo presentations at Solutions! Milan (2024), FELIX GAUDLITZ Vienna (2022) and Rice Leipzig (2021). Lutz is also co-editor of the Anna Mendelssohn Reader (2023) and co-organizer of the ongoing reading series a poetics at Haus am Waldsee Berlin. Vera Lutz lives and works in Berlin.

Hannah Black (b. 1981, Manchester, UK) is an artist and writer based between Marseille, FR and New York, US. Her work explores the intersection of individual/psychological and collective/historical experiences related to class, race, and gender. Incorporating personal and historical anecdotes, her videos and installations delve into broader socio-historical contexts. Black's artistic practice is driven by an inquiry into the boundaries and structures of human relationships, influenced by communist and black radical traditions. Recent solo exhibitions include The Directions, Vleeshal, Middelburg (2025); Hard Limits, Galerina, New York, US (2024); Marked by a Blank or Occupied by a Lie, Octo, Marseille, FR (2024); The Meaning of Life, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2022); Wheel of Fortune, gta exhibitions, ETH Zürich, Hönggerberg, CH (2021) among more.

Ella den Elzen (b. 1994, Toronto) is an artist and curator based in New York. She works across writing, video, sound, sculpture and installation to consider and critique the politics and policies of the built environment, historical modes of representation, and forms of knowledge production and preservation. She currently works as a curatorial assistant at Dia Art Foundation and previously held a curatorial role at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) from 2020–2023.