5 Begging Signs
by Jani Leinonen
Material
Cardboard begging signs, golden frames
Dating
2009 – 2015
About the artwork
Anything Helps consisted of 22 begging signs from 10 different countries, which the artist Jani Leinonen had bought from beggars from all over the world during 6 years. The signs were framed in thick golden frames under a glass. A copper plate on the glass let the viewer know from which city the sign was bought. Paris, New York, London, Milan, Ljubljana, Moscow, Houston etc.
About the artist
The Finnish artist Jani Leinonen plays with the systems of commodity exchange and celebrity and the marketing strategies through which they operate. He attacks symbols and marketing strategies, turning them into objects of ridicule, thereby creating clichés about our agreed marketing society and economic every-day. With these strikes, Leinonen unfolds the chain reaction we all are voluntarily involved in and plays up the iconographies of the global brand land. Leinonen’s installations are shops, bars, slot machines but also plain painting exhibitions. What is displayed, though, are not goods but an artistic allegorization that appropriates these marketing strategies only in order to unhinge their underlying assumptions about value and appropriateness. Leinonen graduated from Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2002. His works have been exhibited widely internationally, i.e. at the Nordic Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennial, Galerie Gmurzynska, Wilhelm Hack Museum Ludwigshafen and the Frankfurter Kunstverein.