Shooting of Masquerade (working title)
video work by Vermeir & Heiremans
Release Spring 2015
From 23.06 – 04.07.2014 Auction House Bernaerts hosted Art House Index – Installation, a site specific intervention that functioned as backdrop for the shoot of Masquerade (working title), the new video of Vermeir & Heiremans.
The story of Masquerade is situated in the ephemeral world of high finance and the global art market. Like finance, art is based on a system of belief and trust, and the market is the place where this belief is called into action.
In Masquerade, the art work has a central place in a narrative about the creation of value in our contemporary economy. As, the artists conceive, the alchemical process of ‘creation out of nothing’ is applicable to art, as it is to the financial markets. Everything in Masquerade revolves around the so-called ‘Art House Index’, a financial instrument that blends together art and real estate.
The film presents itself as a fictive documentary that follows a number of protagonists during staged, fragmented scenes. The protagonists are working professionals engaged in a discussion about the added value merry-go-round that is the ‘Art House Index’.
Masquerade thus investigates the complex relationship between economy, architecture and art in the context of an advanced globalized world. In this world, power is no longer mediated by politics but dominated by finance.