Market Fitness: free participatory lecture series.

A project by Christian Nagler, in collaboration with Azin Seraj

With Market Fitness Christian Nagler brings together two seemingly distant topics of conversation in popular culture: the demystification of the financial system and the importance of individual exercise routines. Both economies and our physical selves are frameworks for cultural and personal existence; however, they are hardly fixed elements, responding in complicated ways—shifting values, recessions—as they face conditions from unemployment figures to IPOs.

Working with video artist Azin Seraj, Nagler merges these concepts into a sweaty, participatory project that pairs lessons on liquidity, derivatives, and exchange rate volatility with vigorous aerobic warm-ups and group movement exercises. Each “lesson” includes an incisively witty video, shot in apt locations such as foreclosed homes in Oakland, the 1915 Pacific Coast Stock Exchange building (now home to a gym), Conoco Phillips Refinery, and a soundtrack of reworked aerobic nightclub pop songs.