HILARY POWELL

BANK JOB

Bank Job encompasses politics and economics, print making, large scale community participation, a former bank building as public event/installation/meeting place, metal casting, book writing, feature documentary film making and literal explosions.

Find out more about the project at www.bankjob.pictures.

The Bank Job feature documentary FILM premiered at Hot Docs 21, had its UK Cinema release May 28 2021 and was nominated for Grierson Awards 2021 and BIFA (British Independent Film Awards) Awards 2021.

Between March 2018 and December 2019 an old high street bank became a place of intensive cultural production and debate. We printed paper money (selling £40,000 worth of it as art) and distributed the proceeds between the four local causes replacing the Queen on the notes (foodbank, homeless kitchen, youth project, primary school) and the purchase and abolition of £1.2Million of local high interest debt. We printed paper bonds that funded a literal explosion of this debt in an artwork called Big Bang 2 blowing up a golden ‘debt in transit’ van on a docklands site with the vista of London’s financial district in the background. We proceeded to salvage and transform the van parts onto coins - souvenirs of a moment distributed to all bond holders. The van offered forth its shattered windscreen that became a one off large scale print ‘Aftermath.’

The banknotes are in the collections of Victoria and Albert Museum, Bank of England Museum, Vestry House Museum, Museum of London, Smithsonian and Fitzwilliam Museum. The Bank opened as part of ARTNIGHT, won the Artquest Artweek Prize as part of Art Licks weekend, Jackson’s Art Prize and Printmaking Today Prize at East London Printmaker’s Festival of Print and was shortlisted for the Ruskin Prize: Agents of Change.

Big Bang 2 toured to the Fitzwilliam Museum as part of Defaced: Money, Conflict, Protest. 2023.