Message behind the pie charts

Sara Hughes. Photo / Supplied

A sunny Saturday afternoon in Berlin and a few short blocks away several thousand protesters are staging a demonstration, marching to tell the G20 leaders, about to meet in London, what's what. Songs will be sung, chants chanted and placards hoisted in the German capital today. Doubtless a few anarchists wearing black ski masks will even smash a bottle or two and swear at the police.

Meanwhile, a little way down the road, New Zealand artist Sara Hughes is safe indoors, sitting atop one of the largest banks in the world, discussing her exhibition and the financial crisis.

Well, sort of. Actually she is sitting on what looks like a giant piece of bright orange pie that represents - rather appropriately, considering the location - Deutsche Bank.

Here at Hughes' recently opened exhibition inside the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, a complex of studios in an historic former Berlin hospital where Hughes is undertaking a year-long Creative New Zealand residency, that piece of bright orange pie turns out to be part of an oversized pie chart. Each wedge represents one of the eight largest banks in the world, "ranked in relation to total assets of US dollars held", Hughes explains.

Hughes' art is often described as "situational" - that is, she makes work that partially depends on the situation in which it's shown for effect.

For example, if you'd seen a photo of her work - say, an intriguing gathering of dots or lozenges or pixellations - you might be forgiven for wondering what the big deal was about this artist, who has won both the Wallace Award and the Norsewear Art Award. But as with the best of jokes, you had to be there.

In the recent past Hughes, whose father is - tellingly - a mathematician, has focused on the way we are constantly bombarded with data. Dots, dashes and digitalism are her oeuvre. Pattern recognition is her touchstone. That's why walking into Hughes' previous exhibitions - often a mind-bending conflagration of colour and shape, a clash of pop and op art - has been a little overwhelming.

And while not quite as disorienting as some of her past shows, there's still a lot to take in at this new Berlin exhibition, named Feedback Runaway.

The banking-inspired pie chart that doubles as seating is scattered on the floor. On one wall, plate-sized pie charts hover in dizzying colours and on the opposite wall, bold graphs march in tidy lines. Elsewhere, jagged lines of coloured adhesive form giant graphs and above one's head, two man-sized bar graphs make the ceiling into a page from an economics textbook.

None of these items are as random as they might first seem. "The gallery becomes a site for hundreds of dislocated sets of numerical content, the most imperative and the most trivial, side by side, overlapping, all vying for attention," Hughes writes in a description of her works.

For instance, to come up with the wall of pie charts, Hughes chose information from a wide variety of sources - the financial markets, the Olympic Games, women's magazines, climate change research and even data about New Zealand beef and lamb. She put that into her computer, which then spat out pie charts. Hughes then painted these graphic representations of the information she had chosen.

The fact that she never chose exactly what to paint, that the information chose the shape of her painting for her, fascinates Hughes. "I've taken some very sophisticated facts and figures but I'm not spelling any of that out," she explains. "The feeling is of the pushing and pulling of the information that surrounds us. If nobody's given you any idea how to interpret them [the graphs] then how do you read them? Visually perhaps - and that visual language is quite different."

Basically, like any good art, it's all about making the onlooker think. "The show isn't completely based on financial statistics. It's also very much about the times we live in," Hughes explains. "I see that financial information as a tiny subset of the information that we are bombarded with, and that continues to replicate all the time."

Maybe the name of the exhibition, Feedback Runaway, explains it best. In biology and in computing, a feedback runaway is the situation that arises when each generation, or loop of data, produces more of itself, resulting in an - often infeasible - increase. In stockmarket speak, a good example is the "bear market"; stock prices are lower, so stockholders sell their stocks, causing prices to fall further - and so on and so on.

Hughes continues: "So it's about taking that subset of information and slowing it down, asking how it influences us but asking that question in a different way. It might make you ask, 'What is this statistic I am sitting on today?'" She gestures at her seat on the fabric-covered orange wedge. "And how does it relate to the graph on the ceiling? And how does it relate to what's in the newspaper today?"

Then, because of the demonstration going on down the road that will surely be in the newspaper tomorrow, the conversation turns to its name: "We Will Not Pay For Your Crisis". Which seems rather a silly thing to shout about given that we are all partially complicit in the way the capitalist system runs. It seems more thought, and maybe a more subtle message, should go into today's hoisted placards.

Despite all the attention she has paid to facts, figures and the financial markets lately, Hughes doesn't have an answer to current financial problems. "I don't invest in stocks either," she laughs.

"For me art doesn't necessarily solve things in that way. What's more important is that it makes us more conscious about - or brings up - issues in a different way. Not necessarily in a straightforward way, in the way you might find it written about in a newspaper, but in more of a visual way."

So maybe instead of trying to break into the local banks and swearing at police officers, today's protesters should come along and see some of Hughes' colourful pie charts. They might give them pause for thought.