Alicja Kwade
Captain's Mistress 1 €

Capitain’s Mistress 1 €, produced in a limited edition of seven copies, consists of seven brass sheets from the production of the European 10-cent coin. These are leftover scraps from a coin mint, which are usually remelted to produce more coins. Kwade rescued the material from the recycling process and hammered real coins back into the perforated sheets in places. In each sheet, ten minted 10-cent coins add up to a total value of one euro. As in many of Kwade’s works, different forces and value systems are related to each other and played off against each other: the immaterial value of the money (€1), the material value of the secret metal alloy of copper, aluminum, zinc, and tin (also known as “Nordic gold”), which is worth more than one euro, and the market value of the artwork, which far exceeds both values – an “added value” that highlights the arbitrariness of value creation processes themselves. The title, which alludes to “love for sale,” is a humorous reference to the well-known board game “The Captain’s Mistress” (in English, “Connect Four”), in which the winner is the player who manages to place four “coins” of one color in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row by alternately throwing them into a perforated frame.
Text: Eva Scharrer