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 traveled 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 fortunetellers 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 cliché. “NY Fortune or Things I Will Do” becomes an ironic self-portrait, presenting personal details of an unconfirmed future.

Nikola Hansalik, born 1975, lives and works in Vienna. She finished her Master in Visual Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2005. Her recent solo shows include “principle of irretrievable breakdown” at Gallery 5020 in Salzburg and “play re play” (together with Michael Gumhold) at Gallery Dreizehnzwei in Vienna. “NY Fortune or Things I Will Do” is Hansalik’s first exhibition in North America.