Knit Songs (We're In The Money, Stormy Weather, It Don't Mean A Thing)

Editioned knit works made for the 2025 Jahresgahbe at GAK (Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst)
Bremen, Germany

2025

Excerpt from gallery text:

Knitted words — in some places they seem quite frayed — tell us that it makes no difference whether it’s sweet or hot, the poor self or about the encounter with the landlord. What reads like comments taken from everyday life are in fact lines from song lyrics that accompany the stock market news on a US radio show. The choice of song—whether it is “We’re in the Money,” “Stormy Weather,” or “It Doesn’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” — depends on changes in stock prices, if they are falling, rising, or “swinging.”

In her artistic practice, Lili Huston-Herterich focuses on how information, in this case the stock market, is conveyed affectively and how it is casually translated into emotions. She uses storytelling, humor, and collaborative knowledge production to reflect on the relationships between environment, history, and the individual.

Huston-Herterich has used leftover yarn from defunct textile factories in the Netherlands to produce her annual gifts. In the 1960s and 1970s, Dutch workers in these factories began to organize themselves into unions. Almost at the same time the country’s industry started moving to the Global South in pursuit of cheaper labor. Factories closed nationwide, and large sections of the population fell into an economic and identity crisis. Huston-Herterich integrates these textile remnants and their history to respond to the geographical and social context in which she works; she uses capitalist culture’s flotsam and jetsam to create work that radically reflects our dependency on the present.

These editions refer to the works showed in the exhibition You Breathe Differently Under the Weight: Debt and Credit at GAK earlier in the year, where the three song titles were featured in large-format drawings. These three songs are played as background tracks on a segment of American National Public Radio (NPR)'s daily show Marketplace, where the stock market numbers are read aloud. What song is played is dependent on whether the numbers are up, down, or "swinging".

These works (each varying editions of three) are available framed or unframed via GAK (Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst).