What if money were a religion?

In WORKS 3: IN GOD WE TRUST, Hannes Priesch takes aim at the great articles of faith of our time: money, power, consumption, growth — and the peculiar unquestioning certainty with which we follow them.

Priesch’s work is political and provocative, yet infused with a sharp, dark sense of humour. Moving between painting, text, installation and deliberately distorted forms of advertising, he creates an unsettling mirror of our consumer society. Here, the Golden Calf is given a new coat of paint, brands become indictments, billionaires turn into modern myths, and the American Dream becomes an absurd parable about greed and the power to define reality.

“In God We Trust” is inscribed on the American dollar. Priesch asks what this sentence really means today. Who, exactly, is this God? The dollar? The market? Mammon? And what happens to a society when profit becomes its highest authority?

The book brings together reproductions of Priesch’s works and texts written especially for the volume by Katia Huemer, Ana Marwan, Georg Bauer, Kurt Remele and Mark Boyle. They approach Priesch’s art from very different perspectives: as a fairy tale about capitalism, a philosophical thought experiment, an ironic interview with a tech bro, and a relentless examination of the animal as a commodity.

Interspersed throughout are artistic advertisements that turn familiar brand worlds against themselves. Fossil fuels, the privatisation of water, the meat industry, social inequality and the power of capital are dissected with equal measures of wit and anger.

Priesch does not preach a simple truth. Instead, he disrupts the familiar order of things — and leaves us to piece the fragments back together ourselves.

An art book about what we believe in.
And about what that belief costs.

WORKS 3: IN GOD WE TRUST is the third volume in the series, continuing Hannes Priesch’s sustained examination of the political, social and economic myths of our time.