Through Barbarous Relic, Tomasz Kobialka interrogates the power dynamics within the financial (educational) institutions and our daily-life engagement with them, through the exploration of pop cultural artifacts from the 80s and 90s Australia. This idea and the conspiracy around it is an ongoing theme within the present and past exhibitions presented by Kobialka. In the beginning was accounting. The earliest written word is a statement of accounts imprinted on a clay cuneiform tablet: markings representing grain, fish, and cattle. In the first and rapidly growing cities of Mesopotamia, clay tablets were a way to track, inventorise, and manage the accumulation of resources over time. Our WEIRD nations - Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic - were built on the idea of taking dutiful care of the property one owns and making sure your debts are paid. Among the corporate offices and luxury shopping vitrines on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, stands The Morgan Library & Museum. On display at this former home of banker J. P. Morgan is Gutenberg's Bible, D rer's Adam and Eve engraving and a photo of Pollock's painting in action, alongside the Mesopotamian tablets. The history of the human world funnels through the purchase history of the world's capital of finance, New York. More mundane objects co-habit this history. The orange you fish out of from the plastic box in your local supermarket, a piece of steak in the fridge, vacuumed in a plastic seal - both are products of deep geological time. The soil for growing and grazing, fertiliser, coal, sour crude oil, and natural gas for transportation as well as the packaging you throw away in a second. As you tap your contactless at the self-checkout, you hold a fragment of linear His-story: of market intensification, deep time turned into future contracts, and the father's name passed down to the son... Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.