Jan Peter Hammer believes the interrelation between literature and film is fundamental the for the development of contemporary artistic practices. Is the reason why after the adaptation of The Anarchist Banker to the screen he continued to make a series of works that seek the importance to notions / concepts that often only appear as remote generalities. To give an example, in one of his most recent works a security guard was hired to sit idly on a quantity of cash, during the opening hours of the gallery. That is, while the function of the guard was to watch over money, the function of money was to pay the guard to be able to see him. Reminiscent of Beckett's literary works, guard and money were locked together in an absurd game, which turns the invisible abstraction of the economic cycle into a painfully concrete action. The artist makes it clear that although money has no price, the guarantee of its value always carries a high social cost.
For the Tilikum project, created for the 2013 Bergen Assembly, Peter Hammer talks about the tragic story of a captive orca in order to address the idiosyncratic ideological foundations and oddities of behaviorism, neuroscience and the management of philosophies. Also in this case, the artist focuses on the experience of an individual - although in this case it is an animal - as a means to make sense of the great social puzzle that is around him.
