Ireland Venice: Kennedy Browne

Kennedy Browne present a body of work commissioned last year for the Irish pavilion at the Venice Biennale. They take as their starting point Dublin as ‘the city Google chose’ for its EMEA headquarters, home to over 167 languages: what the Facebook corporation described as a ‘multilingual pool’. Cumulatively the three works serve as a gestural riposte to a 1980 monologue by neo-liberal economist Milton Friedman, in which he eulogised the humble pencil, describing how it exemplified the harmonious potential of the free market economy to unite the peoples of the world through its manufacture and the operation of a global ‘impartial’ price system.