What happens if you put £1 million in an art gallery — and then give it away?
British artist and ecology catalyst Alexis Bamforth is doing exactly that with ALTRUISM, Devices For The Yet To Come & The Gift, an exhibition at GREATOREX in East London that invites visitors to take home £1,000 each.
Yes, real money.
There’s an irresistible art-historical precedent here. In 1994, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty of the KLF famously travelled to the Scottish island of Jura and burned £1 million in cash as The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid — an act that provoked outrage precisely because of everything else that money could have been used for.
The installation, part of the Whitechapel Gallery Backyard Biennial, puts £1 million into a single room, with Bamforth gifting £1,000 at a time to members of the public through a series of performances. What happens to the money afterwards is up to them.
It sounds like a stunt — and there is clearly some provocation in putting that amount of cash into a gallery — but Bamforth is using money to ask a much larger question: what do we actually value when the systems around us increasingly appear incapable of dealing with climate change, inequality, biodiversity loss and social instability?
The Gift is the first of Bamforth’s Devices For The Yet To Come, a developing series of what he describes as “art as tools for the future”. Created with scientists, specialists and the public, the devices are intended to encourage care, resilience and imagination while exploring food security, biodiversity, health and our relationships with both the Earth and each other.
Rather than presenting the £1 million simply as wealth, the exhibition attempts to turn money back into an exchange between people. Bamforth describes The Gift as being about “feeding the spirit of the gift, its emotional bond and interconnectedness to all things” — part of an attempt to question the economic systems and stories through which value is currently understood.
There’s a deliberately activist edge to the whole project. The exhibition also documents the development of Altruism over the past four years, involving 16 research, scientific and educational partners and 108 schools. A planned pilot intended to benefit 40,000 schoolchildren in deprived areas of the West Midlands remains on hold after five unsuccessful Arts Council funding applications.
Elsewhere, visitors can encounter workshops, films and live broadcasts, while a silent auction offers another collision between art, money and value: Bamforth’s Priceless Begging Bowl, made from £5,000.
Bamforth’s practice has long explored the relationship between nature and socio-economic systems, drawing on Conceptual Art, Land Art and Arte Povera. He has exhibited internationally, from Times Square to the V&A, but describes his preference as making “art for the people, not for people who like art.”
Altruism forms part of PRO RADIX, founded by Bamforth and Suki Jobson and described as the UK’s first arts programme devoted to adaptation in the “polycrisis”. Based at GREATOREX, it connects artists with scientists and specialists to explore the relationships between poverty, inequality, climate and biodiversity.
So you can queue up, take the £1,000 and decide what to do with it on the way home. But perhaps the more interesting part is having to decide what, exactly, constitutes a gift.
Alexis Bamforth: ALTRUISM, Devices For The Yet To Come & The Gift, through 13th September 2026, GREATOREX, 10 Greatorex Street, London E1 5NF. Part of the Whitechapel Gallery Backyard Biennial.
Free advance booking is essential both to visit and to receive The Gift. Book HERE
About the artist
ALEXIS BAMFORTH is a British artist and ecology catalyst who explores relationships between the natural world and socio-economic systems. Evolved from Conceptual, Land art and Arte Povera, he uses cultural references to discuss ideas around human and nature equality, multidisciplinary work that has probed social trends and humankind’s effects on Earth since 1989. His manipulated photocopies predate Sigmar Polka’s. His ‘Banana’ predates Maurizio Cattelan’s, and ‘Rewilding’ a satirical green pixel as NFT, possibly the smallest artwork ever, was copied by Pak, who sold a grey version for 1.36 million, money he could have put to good use. Despite living on oats, refusing to sell anything and avoiding galleries, his work becomes excruciatingly more relevant daily. He’s exhibited internationally, from Times Square N.Y. to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, but prefers to use public space, producing art for the people, not for people who like art. It is art for social purpose and a charitable giving of ideas.
