the_Ned_James
The Greatest Mistake of my Life by Ned James
Marketplace 2012
Division of Labour
Craig Barnes, Jacob Dahlgren, Guy Ben-ner, Sam Curtis, Ned James, Helmet Smits, Andrew Sunderland, Miles Thurlow
The Greatest Mistake of my Life was made in responce to the theme of Marketplace, a show about artists responding to IKEA, the furnature store.
Ingvar Kamprad, the pioneering founder of IKEA, led a complex and deeply contradictory life in his youth. In July 1943, at just 17 years old, he officially registered IKEA while simultaneously maintaining active associations with Sweden’s fascist and Nazi movements. His entrepreneurial instincts had emerged much earlier, as a child selling matchbooks, flowers and fish door-to-door.
Similarly, this exhibition brings together matchbooks, tinned fish, flowers (offered free to gallery visitors) - and IKEA bicycles, arranged throughout the gallery space. The bicycles reference a corporate gift distributed in December 2006, when IKEA presented each of its 9,000 UK employees with a custom-designed folding bicycle, during its annual Christmas breakfast.
Through the language of the gift, the work traces IKEA’s rise alongside its founder’s documented involvement with fascist groups. By bringing together everyday commodities, gestures of generosity and the material culture of a global corporation, the exhibition explores the uneasy relationship between commerce, capital and politics, questioning how the seemingly benign rituals of giving can intersect with, and obscure, troubling histories.