Nikola Hansalik: I want them to buy my art, do I …

About

Seven telephones line the wall of an empty room, lit only by red neon lights. When lifted, the same voice speaks from each receiver and describes the future of Austrian artist Nikola Hansalik. In 2006 Hansalik travelled to New York, where the myth of success lines every street. Exploring the motivating forces behind the ever expanding art market, and questioning the mechanisms which attribute capital value to masterpieces, Hansalik set out to challenge her own future success as an artist. Over the course of a week, she asked a series of Manhattan fortune tellers to predict her future. The seven forecasts she collected, now heard through the seven receivers on the wall in her voice, seem at times uncannily identical, and at others, expectedly different. In asking for multiple predictions and presenting these in the same neon light so synonymous with New York, Hansalik removes the aura and veracity of a single prognosis, and reduces the intimate act of fortune telling into a banal cliche. 'I want them to buy my art, do I…' becomes an ironic self portrait, presenting personal details of an unconfirmed future.