In 2006 Austrian artist Nikola 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 seven telephones that line the wall, 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.

By listening to Hansalik’s voice recite her own physic readings “I want them to buy my art, do I…” essentially becomes an ironic self portrait, describing the success of an unconfirmed future.

Nikola Hansalik, born 1975, lives and works in Vienna. She graduated with a 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. “I want them to buy my art, do I...” is Hansalik’s first exhibition in the UK.