Japanese artist Aki Inomata will open her solo exhibition 'Memory of Currency' at carlier | gebauer in Berlin on Friday, 20 November 2026, the gallery has announced. The evening begins with an artist talk at 6 pm, followed by the public opening at 7 pm, and runs until 9 pm.

The talk brings together Inomata, Tizian Holzbach of Kunstmuseum Bonn, and the cultural scientist and philosopher Prof. Dr. phil. Thomas Macho. It will be held in German, and visitors are asked to register in advance by email. The exhibition follows Inomata's appearance in the gallery's current group show 'Animal Mirror', which closes on 14 November, and her solo exhibition 'Mit-Werden' at Kunstmuseum Bonn, curated by Holzbach.

'Memory of Currency' centres on one of Inomata's best-known long-term projects, in which she collaborates with pearl oysters to create what she calls currency fossils. Tiny sculptural nuclei modelled on the portraits found on banknotes and coins — figures such as Queen Elizabeth II, George Washington, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx and Yukichi Fukuzawa — are implanted into living oysters, which gradually coat them in mother-of-pearl. The resulting pearl portraits, accompanied by video of the shells sinking into the sea, treat money as a fragile system of trust: shells themselves once served as currency in many parts of the world, and the work asks what future viewers might read in these objects about the economic and national systems people once believed in.

The exhibition opens at carlier | gebauer, Markgrafenstrasse 67, Berlin. Inomata, known for artworks made in collaboration with non-human creatures from hermit crabs to octopuses, uses the project to question whether the monetary economy and its narratives of civilisation and value are the only ways to situate human life.