Supply and Demand for Immortality (2011)
Supply and Demand for Immortality is a site-specific installation that consists of two monumental wall murals, one in Arabic and the other in English, which were positioned on either end of the facade of the Sharjah Art Museum, in the United Arab Emirates.
The piece functions as a speculative measuring device, which reflects contemporary attitudes towards the promise of immortality. It uses estimations that are omnipresent in economics-supply and demand-to map alternative indicators, with the Y-axis representing the “Price of Glory” and the X-axis corresponding to the “Quantity of Power.”
The attitudes are plotted in the graph by means of texts collected from popular culture, history and academic scholarship. Where a text is located in space expresses an individual’s rise or demise in relation to the goal of gaining immortality. The idiomatic expressions and ready-made sentences range from “doesn’t give a damn” and “has a dog that is afraid of them” at the bottom of the graph, to “a sucker for shiny things” in the middle, and “feels like they’ve always existed” at the very top.
The texts capture the subjective dimension of social norms, conventions and aspirations, while the context and scale of the work move the graphical form away from a purely semiotic understanding, according to which diagrams function independently of their execution, to emphasize their size, colour and location; in sum, to brush against their reading as a “pure” idea.
Supply and Demand for Immortality, 2011, two vinyl wall murals, 950 cm x 1500 cm each, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation - SB 10 - 2011.
