Page 58 - Buy Russia - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine April 2017

ARTS
58 I CULTURE bne April 2017 & PEOPLE
The figure is very abstract in people's minds. Nobody has seen $1bn.
Moldovan installation art shows serious graft
Carmen Simion in Bucharest
Spray-painted near the entrance to Prague’s DOX - Centre for Contemporary Art, a place where relationships between the Czech Republic’s oligarchs and their ill-gotten gains have often strayed too close for comfort, are the words: “WASH YOUR DIRTY MONEY WITH MY ART”. At the B.P. Hasdeu National Library in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau, it is corruption that forms the centerpiece of a new exhibit by local artist Stefan Esanu that is currently on show.
The ten huge blocks in the hall of the national library are made up of 10mn pieces of paper the size of dollar bills, each representing $100. The installation by Esanu is intended to give the abstract notion of $1bn – roughly the amount that disappeared from three Moldovan banks in 2014 – concrete representation. Esanu’s contemporary art project illustrates the sheer scale of the fraud perpetrated on the Moldovan people, which resulted in losses equivalent to around 10% of Moldova’s annual GDP.
And it was committed against the people, because it has since been revealed that the central bank had extended MDL13.6bn ($1bn) in emergency loans to the three banks, which later had to be liquidated. Last year, Moldova’s gov- ernment issued bonds to compensate the central bank for the loans, meaning that ultimately the cost of the crime will
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be borne by Moldovan taxpayers, as the bonds will be repaid from the public purse over the next 25 years.
Esanu says he wants people to visualise the exact volume
of the fraud. “The figure is very abstract in people’s minds. Nobody has seen $1bn,” he says, adding that people are aston- ished by the quantity when they see it. The ten huge blocks have a total volume of 11.3 cubic metres.
“Somebody stole the money and we, the citizens, will have to repay it”
The installation has been named “La datorie”, which in Roma- nian has two meanings: one being “debt” – a direct reference to the debt the Moldovan citizens now have to repay; the second being “duty”, which Esanu says refers to the duty
that Moldovan citizens feel towards their country. “Somebody stole the money and we, the citizens, will have to repay it...
It is both a financial debt and a duty towards the country,” the artist explains in a telephone interview with bne IntelliNews.