An exploration of how capitalism’s symbols and infrastructures shape our perceptions and emotions, through sculpture, video, sound, and installation.
People Planet Profit marks Peter Fischli’s first monographic exhibition in France.
One of the most significant artists of his generation, Fischli is known for his four-decades-long collaboration with the late David Weiss (1946-2012) as the groundbreaking conceptual duo Fischli/Weiss. Today, Fischli’s solo practice continues his longstanding critical engagement with the aesthetics of the everyday and systems of meaning, through works that playfully upend the distinctions between art and life.
Encompassing recent works across sculpture, installation, video, and sound, the exhibition explores how the signifiers, symbols, and infrastructures of capitalism vie for our attention, endlessly circulating, choreographing our movements, shaping our perceptions, and emotions. At the heart of the exhibition is the image — ubiquitous, mobile, and flattened. All of the images on display, still and moving, were taken with the artist’s mobile phone. Fischli’s use of LUMA’s exhibition spaces gestures towards an ‘augmented city,’ a place where images and citizen-users interact in increasingly entangled digital and physical systems. Here, objects, images, people, meaning, and capital all circulate in apparent perpetuity, leaving us simultaneously intrigued, enchanted, and at times bewildered.
Titled after the ‘triple bottom line’ business concept, the exhibition borrows its framework from a model that sought to expand how we measure corporate success by including social well-being and environmental sustainability alongside financial gain. Through this lens, Fischli interrogates how value is constructed, disseminated, and aestheticized, inviting viewers to consider whether people, planet, and profit truly can coexist, or whether their reconciliation remains an uneasy fiction within late capitalism.
The exhibition places production and transformation of materials, media, labor, and social values at the heart of its process. The setting itself, in the former Forges of the Parc des Ateliers, once an industrial site dedicated to the production and repair of locomotives and now a cultural venue, draws a subtle line through history. From heavy industry to the often flexible labor of today’s creative economies, it reflects the shift from material production to the immaterial flows of data, screens, and service work that define our post-industrial era.
Far from simply showing us images, People Planet Profit returns and refracts the world back to us in new, ever so slightly skewed and unexpected forms, revealing the architecture of a world in constant, dizzying flux.
