JOE DALLESSANDRO - TOY BOY Painting

Funk Punk (Simón Bergman) is a Chilean-Spanish-Finnish artist-filmmaker whose work ricochets between cinema, street culture and high-voltage pop art. Born in Finland and raised in Chile and Spain before circling back north, Bergman grew up absorbing three visual vocabularies at once—Nordic clarity, Latin colour, Iberian drama. Film trained his eye, but paint became the loudspeaker. In The New World Order he hijacks real banknotes—USD, Yuan, Pesos—and overprints them with hard-edged graphics, turning legal tender into cultural tender. The currency’s promise of “trust and stability” fractures; what’s left is pure, buzzing commentary on power, fame and the price tags we stick on everything. “Money is just paper until you charge it with myth,” Bergman says. “I paint to short-circuit that myth and see what sparks.” Whether staging guerrilla happenings at Kiasma Theatre or cutting award-winning films, Bergman tilts every medium toward the same question: what do we worship, and what does it cost? His latest collection answer by looking you straight in the wallet.