By Saga Lofgren
Photos by Christopher Sims and Nahum Mantra

“Money” by Shunt, at 42-44 Bermondsey Street
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To find performance-collective Shunt’s show “Money”, you have to pass one of the tunnels behind London Bridge. It’s dark and humid. Fading techno beats are streaming out from an underground nightclub as girls covered in goosebumps are waiting with anticipation in a firm line, supervised by a burly, bitter-looking security guard.

It all looks very much like a normal Saturday night in central London. As you keep walking the drumming music slowly fades away, and as you step into an old tobacco warehouse another sound is heard – this time it’s that of a needle moving on an old dusty French vinyl. The norm and mentality of your daily flow has all of a sudden changed direction – you’ve entered the imaginary myriad world of Shunt, an experience of unexpected events. Normal rules won’t apply here. Leave the workload at home. Forget the phone bills you have to pay or your the ever-growing pile of dirty washing rotting in your sink.

Leave whoever you are behind and let the Shunt collective show you a place where dystopia and utopia meet and create excellent surrealism that borders on the all-too-real. Shunt wants the viewer to be as much of a participant as a performer, so as soon as you step into the three-storey ‘machinery’ building, a creation similar to French directors Jean Pierre Jeunet and Marco Caro’s imaginary cinematography in ‘The city of the lost children’ or ‘the Delicates’ . Shunt will throw you into the most remarkable sceneries. The show is loosely based on French Writer Emile Zola’s L’Argent, a masterpiece that carries very similar threads to our own credit crunch.

As you enter the show,all you can hear for a few minutes is hunting beats that make your heart jump while standing closely to the other audience members in total darkness – you are covered and exposed at the same time in artistic nothingness.


The installation draws on Miroslaw Balka’s previous ‘box of darkness’ held at the Tate Modern (13th of October 2009 – 5th of April 2010) where every step into the unknowing dark questioned your own fears: “Where light is used I use dark”, Balka says. In a way that is exactly how Shunt use the lack of awareness as a tool to neutralize the mind and to fully accept the change of the participant’s perception of time and space. Money is finishing on the 27th of March but expect more to come from the collective, as their ideas are endless: “We wanted to build a leaking water pipe in front of the machine so it would look like it was raining while people had a beer before the show” says Nahum Mantra, one of Shunt’s members, “but at the end we had to give it up. We never figured out how to make it look quite real so we’ll save it for the next show”.

Shunt will play with your mind; move around, beneath and above you. Rarely have different dilemmas of human nature been described in such a mesmerising way. This surreal vision is a blend of real imagination with genius directing, impressive visual stunts and outstanding performances.

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Money by Shunt

42-44 Bermondsey Street

London Bridge SE 1 3UD

Contact number – 020 737 819 52

7:30 (Door opens at 6:30) Tuesday to Saturday

21:45 (Door opens at 21:00) Friday to Saturday

£20 per ticket

Performance lasts about 90 minutes