Barbarous Relic Tomasz Kobialka

28th March - 17th May 2026

Join us for the opening of first UK solo show from London based Australian-Polish artist Tomasz Kobialka, Friday 27th March from 6-9pm.


In the beginning was accounting. The earliest written word is a statement of accounts imprinted on a clay cuneiform tablet: markings representing grain, fish, and cattle. In the first and rapidly growing cities of Mesopotamia, clay tablets were a way to track, inventorise, and manage the accumulation of resources over time. Our WEIRD nations - Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic - were built on the idea of taking dutiful care of the property one owns and making sure your debts are paid.

Among the corporate offices and luxury shopping vitrines on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, stands The Morgan Library & Museum. On display at this former home of banker J. P. Morgan is Gutenberg's Bible, Dürer’s Adam and Eve engraving and a photo of Pollock’s painting in action, alongside the Mesopotamian tablets. The history of the human world funnels through the purchase history of the world’s capital of finance, New York.

More mundane objects co-habit this history. The orange you fish out of from the plastic box in your local supermarket, a piece of steak in the fridge, vacuumed in a plastic seal - both are products of deep geological time. The soil for growing and grazing, fertiliser, coal, sour crude oil, and natural gas for transportation as well as the packaging you throw away in a second. As you tap your contactless at the self-checkout, you hold a fragment of linear His-story: of market intensification, deep time turned into future contracts, and the father’s name passed down to the son.

Thousands of years ago, a clay tablet was enough to account for one’s flock of sheep, until merchants won against the landowners. Landowners lost control over the prices of their crops and livestock. That cut of meat in your hand at the supermarket carries far more weight than its packaging suggests. It takes the final material form of speculation by investors and traders, machine algorithms, and digital infrastructures. Ironically, Keynes spoke about ‘animal spirits’ - gut instincts - that drive the traders who drive the markets. Somewhere on the 60th floor of a J.P. Morgan skyscraper in Manhattan, behind a computer screen, someone is auctioning off meat that was raised in a muddy field. Without ever seeing the cattle nor touching the grass, and without owning anything, not even the money they trade with.

I’ll pay you today by promising to pay you tomorrow.

We only need to agree on the price ideally today, before the markets close. The price will depend on the value of whatever changes hands, though value is less objective than it sounds. You can point to something that you might desire and declare its price. If another person agrees, a futures contract is drawn up. The promise of a promise that the price will be fixed sometime in the future. On the strength of that promise you buy or sell orange juice or beef, the diesel that distributes them, and the insurance on the machines that produce them. These transactions are wrapped up as a gross domestic product (GDP), a number we use to score how good or bad we did last year. We will call it liberal economics - but perhaps it’s just the long shadow of a setting sun on his-story.

A surprising second order derivative arises: financial stability becomes inherently destabilising. The more you affix the price, the more the market fluctuates. The higher the fear - the emotional index of the market - the more value your stock accrues. You start building, buying and trading in condos built on floodplains, until the externality catches up to you and your fears become facts.

In the end, the history of finance is the linear history of the patriarch. From one Morgan to the next: their fortune made in the cutthroat railroad industry as it colonised the American continent, eventually transmuting into promises traded from the floors of skyscrapers. It is a lineage in which the myth of the self-made man drowns out any record of government subsidy. From the debts of ancient Mesopotamia to your mortgage being sold off by a trader in a Patagonia gilet, the market is the invisible hand of the Leviathan state, a phantom limb we all feel but cannot locate. We are driven by an anxious, relentless compulsion to accumulate capital, one that threads itself through generations of family and kinship. After all, who could resist the temptation of inter-generational wealth?

Text is co-authored by Tomasz Kobialka, Gossamer Fog and Vaida Stepanovaite-Kobialka