Beate Passow: Monkey Business

A Barbary macaque sits on a martial gun barrel in Gibraltar. A powerful bear mounts a bull on Wall Street. A skeletal figure strides over destroyed refugee boats on Lampedusa. In her series of images “Monkey Business,” the artist Beate Passow portrays a mysterious fairytale world of political dimensions. The black-and-white images—which upon closer observation turn out to be sophisticated tapestries—question the ruling systems, economic structures, and political movements of contemporary Europe. Narrating a penetrating mythology of the twenty-first century, Passow subverts the tapestry form, which traditionally praised rulers and heroes, and instead critiques the rise of corrupt capitalism, xenophobia, and military control in today’s Europe.