The Act (2019–2021), a solo presentation by Alex Chalmers, comprises all 189 pages of the New Zealand Insolvency Act 2006. This piece of legislation is revised from its 1967 predecessor; between the two acts, one’s options for significant personal debt remain largely unchanged. In the instance of uncollectible debts exceeding $40,000, the insolvent individual’s main option is to declare bankruptcy.

This is the first time The Act (2019–2021) has been shown in its entirety, situated in the specific context of Aotearoa New Zealand, and just down the road from Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland (UoA). Like most tertiary institutions here, the UoA charges high fees to students, typically paid through student loans, which are managed by the Inland Revenue Department once study is complete. Upon exiting the university, one is likely to be saddled with tens of thousands of dollars owed, and the threat that if you leave the country—even if opportunities in Aotearoa are mediocre—your loan will accumulate interest at a rate that swiftly becomes difficult to service. This proximity to the UoA underscores the relationship between education and debt essential to Chalmers’ exhibition, and has the effect of consummating The Act (2019–2021).

Across this document, Chalmers’ drawing articulates a symbology of economic status through emojis, Disney, dollar signs, percentage markdowns, and sports cars. Borrowing from pop-culture codes and visual cues for money-related idioms—the ‘hand out’ for example, and ‘heads or tails’—The Act (2019–2021) registers the discrepancy between the complex debt apparatus that underpins the economy and the impenetrable nature of this system for the public who is implicated in it. Within this mark-making, paintbrush cleaning and outcomes of life-drawing classes also appear; that the Act was the paper closest to hand expresses the psychic burden resulting from debt. It is the surface upon which all other thoughts about one’s life, value, possibilities, acquisitions, future, and politics come to land. Debt is taken on not only as a financial weight, but a moral one too.

Debt converts the past into an ahistorical balance sheet, skating over the British origin of Aotearoa’s legal, economic and educational models—which are part of the enduring inheritance of colonisation. Despite upholding Western intellectual tradition, those who are pulled to the cultural origin of this education system after studying are punished by heightened debt. The normalisation of high student-loan debt also obscures how recently the ‘user pays’ structure was introduced—in 1991—stifling an imagination for future transformation. The Act (2019–2021) points to these corrupted logics of our
civic institutions, posing bankruptcy as an available and alternative political gesture.