Pursuing Sartuzi’s continued interest in ideas of theft, value, circulation and trickery, the exhibition features a new series of works that the artist created in the aftermath of his Sleight of Hand project (2023-25), which began by the substitution of a historical coin from the British Museum collection. Indeed, on 18 June 2024, during a program that allows visitors to handle collection pieces from the museum, Sartuzi used a legerdemain to swap an original coin, minted in 1645, for a replica, before depositing the original coin in the institution’s donation box.

On 5 September 2024, Sartuzi received a letter from the British Museum’s Legal Services stating that they had ‘reasons to believe that, notwithstanding [his] statements to the press, [he] may still be in possession of the original Coin’. From this accusation of playing a double-trick on the institution, the interpretation of what actually occurred on the 18 June is even more open to speculation.

At NıCOLETTı, Sartuzi presents CCTV images, internal communications, documents and e-mails exchanged with the British Museum’s Legal Service that reveal the infrastructure of the museum – its security system and bureaucracy – while performing an action that exposes the breaches in its legal structure. Through this gesture, the artist points to a legacy of institutional critique and Brazilian conceptual art, evoking works such as Cildo Meireles’s Ocasião (Occasion, 1974/2004) – an installation that plays with the idiom ‘opportunity makes a thief’.

In A CRIME, A CONFESSION AND A TRADE, Sartuzi expands on these traditions by presenting an artwork realised in collaboration with a collector, who has been offered to purchase an original 1645 shilling from Newark in exchange of a replica of the same coin produced by the artist. Reflecting upon ideas of circulation, forgery and the economics of the art world, this simple gesture between the artist and the collector questions the ways in which value is attributed to art and anthropological/historical objects.

These ideas are further explored through artworks that reference two films by French filmmaker Robert Bresson: Pickpocket (1959) and L’Argent (1983). While Pickpocket follows a protagonist in his (failed) attempt to produce a coherent confession, L’Argent follows the trajectory of a forged 500 Francs note and the chain of tragic events set off by the use of this counterfeit bank note.

Focusing his attention on ‘the extraordinary abilities of hands, their intelligence’, in Bresson’s words, Sartuzi shares this interest of precise gestures. In his film Pickpocket / L’Argent, he uses three short clips of Bresson’s eponymous films, connecting and rearranging their narratives to create a continuity between shots that were made more than two decades apart. In other works, posters, book pages and images from Bression’s films are combined with photographs by Sartuzi, adding layers of parafiction to the reality of his (supposed) heist. Playing with tricks, misdirections and detournements, these works create intertextual connections that complexify the interplay between the original and the forgery, the theft and the trade, real (transactional) actions and fake (confessional) statements.