Old Monkeys (Two Smiles) (2026) brings two vintage monkey dolls into an intimate, almost tender encounter. Positioned arm in arm and sharing a smartphone, their original factory-made expressions of sleepy detachment are transformed into something resembling absorption and delight. The toys appear unexpectedly alive through the simple act of looking together, their relationship made legible through a device that has become an ordinary instrument of human sociality.

On the phone, archival black-and-white footage shows two young girls laughing at something beyond the frame. They are watching monkeys at a zoo, creating a playful reversal of the familiar relationship between spectator and spectacle. The children observe captive animals for their entertainment, while here the monkeys appear to observe captive humans through a technology of their own making. The image establishes a circuit of looking in which the positions of subject and object continually exchange.

The work extends this reversal into a broader meditation on how value is constructed and reassigned. The dolls, once mass-produced children's companions and now collectible objects, occupy a new context in which their emotional, historical and monetary significance has been transformed. The gallery itself becomes another kind of enclosure: a system in which objects are removed from ordinary use and given new forms of cultural and financial value. Rather than offering a simple reversal of power, Old Monkeys (Two Smiles) suggests that ideas of value, whether emotional, ethical, cultural or economic, are unstable, relational and continually remade through acts of looking.