Aboriginal artist Richard Bell is sitting on a bench in Kassel, Germany, enjoying the sunshine and crowds, when a couple from Austria approach him to ask about his work, Pay the Rent (2022), currently atop Kassel's Fridericianum museum as part of the international quinquennial exhibition Documenta.
Bell, 68, is genial, gracious and more than happy to chat about his large-scale metronomic digital sign, which displays a rapidly inflating number calculating the debt owed to First Nations people by the Australian government. In fact, he's made sure information about the work is hard to come by other than word of mouth.
