Knitted words—in some places they seem quite frayed—tell us that it makes no difference whether it’s sweet or hot, the poor self or about the encounter with the landlord. What reads like comments taken from everyday life are in fact lines from song lyrics that accompany the stock market news on a US radio show. The choice of song—whether it is “We’re in
the Money,” “Stormy Weather,” or “It Doesn’t Mean
a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”—depends on changes in stock prices, if they are falling, rising, or “swinging.”
In her artistic practice, Lili Huston-Herterich focuses on how information, in this case the stock market, is conveyed affectively and how it is casually translated into emotions. She uses storytelling, humor, and collaborative knowledge production to reflect on the relationships between environment, history, and the individual.
Huston-Herterich has used leftover yarn from defunct textile factories in the Netherlands to produce her annual gifts. In the 1960s and 1970s, Dutch workers
in these factories began to organize themselves into unions. Almost at the same time the country’s industry started moving to the Global South in pursuit of cheaper labor. Factories closed nationwide, and large sections of the population fell into an economic and identity crisis. Huston-Herterich integrates these textile remnants and their history to respond to the geographical and social context in which she works; she uses capitalist culture’s flotsam and jetsam to create work that radically reflects our dependency on the present.
Her annual gifts refer to the works she showed in the exhibition You Breathe Differently Under the Weight. Debt and Credit—the three song titles transferred to large-format drawings.
Lili Huston-Herterich (*1988) was Artist-in-Residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Netherlands until 2025. Before this, she studied fine art at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and York University in Toronto, Canada. Her works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions at venues including Sammlung Philara in Düsseldorf, Germany; Brutus in Rotterdam, Netherlands; Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, Germany; Index in Stockholm, Sweden; and Zalucky Contemporary in Toronto, Canada.
Jahresgabe 2025
Lili Huston-Herterich
Stormy Weather, 2025
We’re In The Money, 2025
It Don’t Mean A Thing, 2025
synthetic yarn made from leftover stock, knitted
42 x 28 cm (work)
3 motives, each an edition of 3
unframed 650,- incl. 7% VAT
framed je 800,- incl. 7% VAT