Value Quest—Art of Fortune & Economy of Risk

Broadcast on RTS 2, Serbian National Television during the exhibition in Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Serbia

• Maja Skovran (RTS): A solo show of Urtica, art and media research group, is taking place in the Salon of Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade. The artistic research project Value Quest, Art of Fortune and Economy of Risk, explores phenomena connected to art and economy, hazard games and their principles. The exhibition is designed as dedication to traditional hazard game the roulette, and it stays faithful to its rules and standards.
• Eduard (Urtica): A VQ Roulette table connects several aspects. One of them is a hazard game, which follows the rules of roulette but in slightly modified way. When you are playing VQ Roulette you are not playing for your own sake but for the one of industrial sectors that you selected. There are ten industrial sectors (chips in game), each of which is symbolically shaped.
• Violeta (Urtica): You can put the chip on Struggle, Withdrawal, or Speculation, as you chose.
• Eduard (Urtica): At first glance this connection seems illogical, but on a long run art wins no matter what since the gambling gain is always transient. The second aspect that we find important is viewpoint on practical economy that we depicted in connection to art, artistic production, and presentation of art. That's why the exhibition, next to the central roulette segment, comprises the retrospective-introspective analysis of personal achievements (Stratagame polyptych). Simply you can not plan everything…
• Violeta (Urtica): each action brings risk, nothing is 100% safe…
• Eduard (Urtica): That’s why we emphasized the risk as dominate motif and dominant model in our work…
• Violeta (Urtica): on one hand you have The Risk and on other The Planning. These pillars, in the center of the gallery, represent four necessary resources to produce an art piece.
• Zoran Erić (curator MoCAB): I think that this exhibition opens very serious questions, which penetrate from the narrow context of art into the wide context of social matters. The question of Value analytically subsume broad contextual sphere. The question asked by the artist is arising form specific position in art, a position of artist-researcher. From my point of view it is very important for Urtica. They position themselves as researchers that utilize different models. This exhibition could be seen as model of marketing media analysis, or campaign simulation that questions the issue of Value in a broad sense. Within the context of art we think about artworks as the most valuable ones, the market goods of fabulous prices. We often read in the newspapers about the record prices of artworks (e.g. paintings of Picasso). But there is also a question of social values. It’s very challenging, and now the artists are trying to point possible directions in investigation (The Value Quest).