The farmer, the broker; the cultivator, the investor; the producer, the seller. These relationships formed the basis of MAP Office’s exhibition “The Oven of Straw,” which occupied the main hall of Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art last month. In an era of spiralling economic crisis, the display was a meditation on and scrutiny of the capitalist economy, ultimately highlighting its fundamental fragility.

Shifting away from their typical focus on hyper-modern urban environments, the Hong Kong-based artist-urbanist duo turned toward a more timeless and rural subject: straw. The monumental Bank of Grain (2012)—an imposing fortress-cum-haystack—dominated the exhibition space, yet MAP Office’s commitment to critical theory remained paramount despite the archetypal material. A video screened within the structure features images of peasant revolt accompanied by a narration that recalls in authoritative tones the fervent rhetoric of The Communist Manifesto, alluding to Marxist notions of value production and the foundational role of the economy to society.

The tripartite film, stitched together from Soviet, Chinese and American propaganda movies and news reports, reflects on the multifaceted metaphor of wheat—as the basis of life, the foundation of economic systems (both capitalist and communist) and as a catalyst of history—while also pointing to an unalterable fragility. The narrator suggests that the material basis of the bank structure is also the source of its self-destruction: “The bank converted into an oven, here bread burns to dust.” Wheat, therefore, proves a potent analogy for our society: both are vulnerable to the forces they confront and are prone to disaster.

“The Oven of Straw” is a roaming exhibition. With this nomadic format, MAP Office hopes to infuse a universally relevant message with regionally specific meanings, maintaining that “every project involves a set of relations to its site.” Prior to its Beijing stop, the work debuted at the Kyiv International Biennale in 2012, and it is next slated to exhibit at a number of galleries in the fertile prairies of America’s Midwest. In both Kyiv and Beijing—locations where grain is both a primary source of sustenance and failed harvests have been responsible for devastating famine—viewers expressed a nostalgia that was tinged with painful memories. In Ukraine, the exhibition stood across the road from a memorial to the four million famine deaths of the 1930s. In China, the reception was similarly bittersweet, as a tragedy associated with the Great Leap Forward remains off limit to public discussion, forming part of an as-yet-unhealed scar.

 “The Oven of Straw” will be completed only after its sojourn in the United States, where memories of the Dust Bowl crisis and New Deal utopianism of the 1930s, and Cold War divisions in the aftermath of the Second World War, are likely to generate further discussion.

• Beijing, China
• China
• Hong Kong