Photography is a surface phenomenon: it captures appearances and keeps them in the visible world. And yet this is a deceit. Its trick and real power are to embroil us in a psychic economy of pictures of loved ones, memories to keep, objects we desire, facts to believe in. Photography – by nature excessive and proliferating – matters by reaching into our minds and nervous systems. ‘Porn consumption among the young is massive’, as it says on a newspaper flyer in the photo that is the invitation for the show.

The more wasteful we are with taking and consuming pics, the more numb we become to their unseen significations and mystic energies. They creep back in when the image is isolated in the undead time of the white cube. In Jonas Handskemager’s minimalistic presentations, the terseness of the still or moving images belies the (in different ways) hysterical conditions that they picture: in the film, a dog race and a goldsmith working with gold and jewels. At the beginning there's a blur of shiny cars, as if the recording took place inside pure visual effect. Parts of the film pass in slow motion, like in a dream.

Images catalyse the fetish for seeing as culture’s privileged mode of perception. Which means that we don’t see at all. We look through the eyes of desire. This is how pleasure is regulated. The fetish is a synthesis of desire that turns into semiotic kink, sparking displacements and simulacra. In the film, none of what is depicted is real – the ‘rabbit’ which the dogs are chasing is a sorry cockade composed of a heap of plastic strips, the jewels are synthetically produced lab diamonds. In the exhibition, two signs – one saying ‘currency’, the other ‘courtesy’ – aren’t signs that we may orient ourselves by, but signifiers of entire economic and moral systems. The POV camera that is mounted on one of the greyhounds blends animal with human gaze and suggests how value is gratuitously invested with meaning. Culture’s perimeter defined by Pavlovian mechanisms. 

Desire produces jump cuts of meaning by latching onto objects, giving sometimes disparate phenomena a coherent psychic script. Also presented in the exhibition are photos from the Danish National Bank during renovation. A central bank is alpha and omega: the centre of the spheres of circulation, it is the master of currency and where all amounts are due. It is what is ultimately borrowed against. Symbolically, the national bank ensures that the state is always present in value transfers. It literally makes good on the claim that the state has a heart of gold. This affective notion spills over into the conservative idea of the nation’s organic continuity, as if the bank were a stern father with credible and exacting standards that permeate history. God loves our standard of living. 

Or that’s how it used to be. Now a new speculative confusion reigns. Gold is long gone as a value standard. The international monetary system was based on the US dollar for a good half a century, but that surely isn’t on anymore, what with Daddy in the White House. The vistas of the renovation of the Danish National Bank – stylish Nordic modernism with its lid off - are sad, like a building that sees a shrink after a depression. Maybe capitalism’s accelerated cycles of boom and bust have become unbearable, even for the central bank.  

New productions of value and transfers of desire beckon. Gazes are lit; the hunt is on. In the last sequence of the film, we see that the goldsmith has a Leica.