June 6–August 1, 2026
When Liv Schulman filmed her video piece The New Inflation (2021) in the summer of 2021, the United States was stumbling out of one economic crisis––unemployment, price gouging, and supply chain interruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic––into another, as the economy soon entered one of its highest periods of inflation since 1981. Whereas American millennials tend to see economic downturns like this, the 2008 Great Recession, and Occupy Wall Street as inflection points in their lives, Argentinians like Schulman look back to the life-altering great depression of 1998. Driven by post-dictatorship austerity measures, periods of hyperinflation, and widespread debt, the Argentine peso was significantly devalued against the American dollar, plunging the country into a lasting period of economic stagnation.
Schulman’s sixty-three-minute-long film treats financialized capitalism with both the seriousness––and insanity––it deserves, presenting this infrastructure as being as fickle and speculative as it is integral to contemporary life. Schulman, whose work draws from theatrical and cinematic history, frames her narrative-cum-manifesto as an absurd chamber play: in a clinically white room with minimal sets, five characters––aptly named Rockbottom, Myneeds, Wrong, Best Intentions, and Flaw––act out a series of vignettes unconcerned with legibility or continuity. It begins with one person delivering a spoken word monologue, perched on a ladder high above the other four. Accompanied by an electric bass, she describes the origins of this world, interweaving physical realities with the permeability––and subjectivity––of the socioeconomic forces by which we are ruled: capitalism, colonialism, and a crumbling sense of self. “The universe became a playground for all the things we no longer needed,” she intones. “The body became the border, and the blood became the police.”
By the end of this prelude, any sense of clarity dissolves into nothing, forgoing any clear character development or storytelling in favor of Buñelian farce. The New Inflation adopts the abrasive theatrical traditions pioneered by Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, creating a distancing effect through non sequiturs, circular logic, and otherwise nonsense language. The effectiveness of this varies from sequence to sequence. While one conversation focused on a marketing group “for women and dogs” offers a parable for the way that misogyny and gendered violence seeps into everyday commerce, other references to coffee beans, colonial France, pizza delivery men, and starving artists are absurd in a way that does not necessarily allow for any sort of deeper meaning or equivalence. Despite these weaker moments, The New Inflation begins to coalesce around a central thesis. Although presented as a “hard” social science backed up by data and charts, the economy––and by extension, money and precious metals––is a human-made phenomenon, and only has as much power as it is given. Instead of a natural force like gravity, one character notes, “in of itself, money’s not wealth, it’s a conversion.” Yet Schulman gets in her own way by undermining salient points like these with silliness––as when one character makes a sophomoric quip that dollar bills and coffee filters are both just pieces of paper bearing different amounts of power.
Despite the tonal missteps, the sequences in The New Inflation add up to a clear if somewhat shallow punchline: these powerful systems are not supported by any basis in reality, it’s all made up by the richest to ensnare the lower classes. The inflation and economic crises of recent decades are based on a dream logic and violence that began long before our contemporary markets and show no signs of stopping. Elsewhere in times’s Chinatown loft, Schulman has haphazardly installed helium balloons that float around the ceiling, and a makeshift garland of extension cords and trash. Schulman’s most successful piece of satire in the exhibition, the gallery space looks like the apocalyptic remains of some long-ago celebration. The party may be over, but the next market collapse is right around the corner.
