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Artist visa is performative object- sculpture. It is a “credit card” of sparkling gold plastic, with the one digit “0” occupying the center. It has nothing except zero on it, not even cardholder’s name, no other digits, no expire date, nothing.

0 is enough for identification. If I have 0 I am 0, and it is not necessary to put my name, or anything else on it. The amount is only valid identification.
Artist visa is comment on artist position in contemporary society, not only artist position.

We have all experienced that little 0 on the credit card, it’s even good news if it’s positive 0.
We live our lives through bank-loans, we depend on some platinum, gold, silver small cards that are not even real. Those sweet pieces of plastic painted in gold or other colours become status symbols. They are also virtual at some point. We could not earn as much as we can spend, we always owe something in our meritocratic society, where accomplishments are being measured by material goods, money, consumption, production.

Artist visa was made for some kind of performance and needed engagement of spectators. I gave my "gold credit cards” to the public at the opening of one exhibition in Berlin 2013. They used them as real credit cards in shops. It was weird. The cards were just plastic, without an active magnetic strip, but people took them to nearby shops and tried to use them to purchase real items. That created very bizarre situations. I repeated the same performance with passers-by in Warsaw 2015. One German collector tried to pay some cakes with it. I have filmed that action. He urged the shopkeepers to keep trying to put the transactions through, but the cards, without a qualifying bank behind them, couldn’t purchase anything. Ladies at the till were persistent, but nothing happened. The sellers were very confused by trying to pull the card through the POA machine, but everything went wrong at the end.

milena_jovicevic_artist visa small
Milena Jovicevic

Artist visa, PAY & P(L)AY, plastic gold visa cards Institut für Alles Mögliche, Berlin, Germany, 2013

Video frames, Using artist visa, Warsaw, Poland, 2015

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