Reception

An art piece made from Lebanese currency: banknotes shredded by the Central Bank of Lebanon, re-made by hand into a Hard Currency of our own.

Hard Currency began after we lost our museum in the Beirut explosion. We lost our factory, friends and relatives. Then came the financial crisis, followed by war. The project started almost three years ago and went through its own disasters along the way, including two programmers who left the system in a complete mess. We even launched Hard Currency during an exhibition without the website, before the system was eventually taken down without explanation. Now we are rebuilding it properly.

Hard Currency was created to help bring our studio and workforce back. We once worked with more than 12 skilled people, tailors, printers, craftspeople, artists, music producers and senior makers with years of experience. We don't want to watch that knowledge disappear. Today, we are bringing that workforce back together for our second BANK exhibition in Beirut and rebuilding the studio as a space where artists and craftspeople can work, produce, experiment and collaborate. You can see some of our projects at www.superextrahalawa.com.

Because almost everything can lose its value. Currencies collapse. Markets change. Numbers disappear. An artwork is different. It can carry a story, a person, a place or a moment. Sometimes it doesn't need to mean anything at all. It simply exists because someone put a piece of themselves into it. Hard Currency is not money pretending to be art. It is art questioning what we decided money is worth in the first place.

We will not announce our main plan yet, because it is not registered. But we can assure you that BANKSOUKSAWDA is registered, so anyone who would think of using it will be sued. We don't care if you use it on white pigeons: we will sue the pigeons and the creative copycat behind it.

For those who say it's just an idea: by stealing someone else's idea, people don't work for you, so they would come up with another idea. Outsmarting is killing the art scene.

Scan the Master Key QR code inside your pack with your phone camera. The form opens with your Hard Currency already filled in. Add your name, username, email and telephone, then press SEND.

The four words printed inside your pack. They prove the Hard Currency is yours, so keep them to yourself.

Yes. Use the same email each time, and every Hard Currency you claim is added to your Vault.

In your Vault. It opens as soon as you claim a Hard Currency.

Each Hard Currency can be claimed only once. a Hard Currency that already has an owner shows as Claimed.

Press the trailer on the home page. The best scores go on the score board.

We will not sell or share your personal information with any party whatsoever. The only party we deal with is when the music is good and the DJ is not playing commercial.

SoukSawda is an independent cultural platform founded in Beirut in 2016, working across printmaking, publishing, artistic production and the preservation of printed material and cultural heritage. Its practice brings together artists, designers and cultural practitioners from Lebanon and around the world through editions, publications, exhibitions, live printing and collaborative projects.

Alongside its contemporary practice, SoukSawda preserves Lebanese archival heritage, printed matter, ephemera and cultural material spanning different places and periods. Through research, publishing, exhibitions and artistic collaborations, these materials are brought into contemporary circulation. At its core, SoukSawda centers on how objects carry memory, how print moves ideas between people and places and how history can be passed forward without being reshaped to suit the present, preserving the meaning, character and historical identity of the material itself.