Post Capitalistic Auction

Post Capitalistic Auction is a long-term performance project and an actual alternative art auction that examines how value is produced, negotiated, and exchanged beyond monetary price. Developed since 2018, the work transforms the auction from a market mechanism into a live framework for testing plural systems of value.

Artists, artworks, bids, transactions, and contracts are all real. However, participants are invited to bid not only with money, but also through four parallel currencies: Money, Opportunity, Understanding, and Exchange. All offers are submitted through specially designed software, and artists personally decide who receives their works. A panel representing different positions within the art ecology participates in the event, creating dialogue and confrontation among competing systems of legitimacy and value.

Each edition is developed in close collaboration with local artists, curators, programmers, auctioneers, and institutions. While maintaining the same core mechanism, the project evolves through different cultural contexts and art ecosystems, functioning as both an artistic work and a comparative inquiry into the social life of value. Since its premiere in Bergen, it has been presented in Yokohama, Toronto, and Hong Kong, continually absorbing and reflecting transformations within the contemporary art world.

The project uses the auction format as both a real transaction mechanism and a public performance structure. It keeps the binding nature of bidding while expanding what a bid can contain and who has authority to decide the final outcome.