Ryan Gander | The Find | Manchester International Festival 2023

‘The stuff outside in the world is way better than anything you’ll find in any museum’

The artist explains why he is giving away free coins at the Manchester International Festival and how he hopes to capture the attention of the 99% of people who aren’t interested in contemporary art.

The jingling of newly minted coins heralds the latest work by Ryan Gander, The Find (2023). He is a fan of disrupting the prevailing spirit of art as an exercise in ever-escalating object commodification. So, for the Manchester International Festival 2023, he is minting 200,000 coins made of cheap nickel, which he says are “of no monetary value”, and dispersing them, with the help of 100 volunteers, throughout the city’s streets, parks and piazzas, free, during the festival.

However, these coins do offer philosophical value. He has printed on each side two opposing concepts that he hopes may help people in their decision-making, or offer guidance: Solo/Together; Action/Pause; Speak/Listen. “It helps disrupt the kind of structural order that we’re all stuck in that we could escape quite easily,” he says.

He tells Studio International: “The purpose of them is actually to remind people – to remind myself – that money isn’t our greatest value. When we start to question it logically, it becomes quite low on the scale for people. If you think about the ideas of time, of agency and attention, they’re of far greater value to us really than money is. But we’re all obsessed with things.”

Gander says the simple choices offered on the coins are inspired by words of wisdom he treasures from his mother and father. He has placed a further philosophical quote of his father’s, “Time is your greatest asset”, in huge lettering across the front of Selfridges department store looking on to Exchange Square.

Together with the daily scatterings of coins from The Find, he calls this Intervention Space. It includes a vending machine within the store containing pebbles that he has signed. Each one costs £10, and the proceeds will go to a charity of his choice.

Further quotes from his parents will appear on billboards around the city during the festival, to alert Mancunians to this treasure hunt. It is the ordinary local people – “the 99% of the audience (that) has no interest in contemporary art, and don’t even realise these (coins) are contemporary art” –that he is most excited about reaching. “It’s more important to me because it’s a great introduction; it kind of de-stigmatises contemporary art.”

Manchester International Festival, various venues
29 June – 16 July 2023

Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY