High Altitude

In January, 2009, Michael Najjar stood on the top of Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the world outside of Asia. The photographic material that he assembled there formed the basis for a series on the fluctuations in financial markets. Najjar visualized the indexes of the world’s most important stock exchanges and made virtual data tangible by giving it the form of serrated mountain tops. The work is a metaphor for the thin line that separates the real and the virtual, a line which in the Exchanges – where virtual money has become more important than the goods and firms that it is supposed to represent – has become blurred perhaps more than anywhere else.