Please Empty Your Wallets

Combining the works of invited artist with the works from the Museum’s holdings, this exhibition is a continuation of last year’s exhibition From Within the Giant's Belly. It addresses the issues of economic deregulation and destabilization of labor-capital relations, taking casino capitalism as the thematic basis. We deal with artworks that explore the gambling dynamic of financial institutions, an increase in speculative ways of making business, risky models of investments and volatile creditor-debtor relations. Promises of salvation and signs of drowning, peaks and precipices of the global financial flow, frenzied oscillations between social euphoria and social panic, are some of typical scenes in the exhibition. We gather works created mainly over the past decade, which reveal that the promises of endless growth and prosperity, given with the establishment of open market, are not more than an illusion. This is accompanied with fishy ways of raising capital, questionable value of money and almost almighty role of financial sector in forming of the image of reality, in which the parameters of minimum and maximum, of real and far-fetched possibilities, are stretched to the limits. We raise the question, where does the contemporary enterprise take us and how does it spin the Rota Fortunae of the largest masses? In a fusion of the spheres of financial, marketing and entertainment industry, the gallery space becomes filled with brokers, moguls, gurus, spin doctors, con artists… Ghost people are also there, reminding us of the demonic side of corporate world. The alluring language of capital, rapid expansion of debt and the use of unusual methods of salvation are the themes connecting the gathered works. Relations between plausible and irrational ways of business, differences between adherence to control mechanisms and submission to dubious maneuvers bring us back to the original format of the exhibition, presented as a comparison between games of chance and hazards of the global casino. By showing different artistic approaches and processes, this exhibition offers a caricature description of today’s system, which is being served as the credible model of the world. It meets the growing conformism with carnivalesque expressions and black humor interventions into the everydayness, which treat art itself as part of a speculative endeavor.