A Collector’s Album of Traders, Traitors, Translators, and Experientialists

Overview

In the late nineteenth century, trade cards – long used by merchants to advertise their businesses – became what we today know as ‘trading cards’. Packaged with products such as tobacco and gum, these cards typically featured sportsmen like boxers and footballers. By the 20th century, these small cards – or in some cases, stickers – were prized enough to be traded between collectors and saved in special albums. Cabinet has appropriated this tradition, creating 64 trading cards featuring prominent exemplars of four characters featured in the conceptual framework of the Biennial, namely, the Trader, the Traitor, the Translator and the Experientialist. Aspiring collectors can purchase these stickers at select shops throughout Sharjah and collect them in an album featuring biographical sketches.


April 2011

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 10

Commissioned and published by Sharjah Art Foundation