The turn of phrase, ‘Money rules the world’, is as hackneyed as it is true. But what can be said about a world or a society that is, mutatis mutandis, ruled by a kind of potato? And what does the existence of such an economy mean for our economic world? These are just the initial questions that could be raised by the exhibition of works by Georg Keller (*1981) entitled Primitive Economies.

In his work, Georg Keller engages with economic structures and with the mechanisms of globalization and their impact on man and his environment. He uses the 2016 Manor Art Prize Central Switzerland Lucerne to facilitate a whole series of new sculptures and installations which he developed on the basis of anthropological descriptions of ‘primitive economies’. Trade is also always a form of community formation. A society’s trading methods are indicative of its values and world views. Georg Keller translates alternative payment methods (from the potato to the kimono) and trading and exchange rituals into his reduced pictorial idiom, prompting us to reflect on our system.