Michael Mandiberg

No Longer Empty in Chelsea Hotel

Since the beginning of the Great Recession the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has taken control of over 70 failed or failing banks. The government has bailed out, or brokered forced sales of a number of other major financial institutions. These emergency conversions are done in one weekend; on Friday the bank is alive, but at 6 PM it begins a massive autopsy, and by Monday morning all traces of the original bank are gone.  It is operated under the name of a formal rival bank, many of the employees are gone, and the entire visual signage has changed. These logos disappear from our memory, they disappear from the clutter of the visual landscape, they are even erased from the Internet and its many archives.  Mandelbaum’s installation reclaims the visual signage and puts that which would be forgotten back into circulation.