BE HAPPY

Exhibition of artistic couple MP_art called NYLON_Friday morning-happy people is the continuation of the project CAPITAL started in 2009, and which was exhibited in 2009 in Belgrade and in 2010 in Novi Sad. In the project CAPITAL artists criticize the view according to which capital is a measure of the value of certain works of art and the art system and it raises the question of how to establish the value of a work of art. Their previous non-commercial, ephemeral art practice opposes the laws of the market and capitalism. As Bourriaud points out, contemporary art no longer has strong material support, it does not operate with objects today, in the time of mass media it deals with information, news and other non-material facts. The idea of ​​neoliberal capitalism that free market, i.e. the holders of capital form prices and thus the value of something can not be applied in art as culture and education testify to the fact that market price and value are not the same.

This exhibition treated the flow of capital in the domain of elite art. In contrast, exhibition NYLON_Friday morning-happy people treats the flow of capital at a flea market, where it is smooth and unfettered and where those involved in this type of grey economy are mainly ensured mere survival. Exploring the phenomenon of flea market in Novi Sad, the city where they live, they discovered a parallel world in which there are a large number of people who meet their basic needs buying or selling used, discarded things. Over two years, the artistic couple made a series of photographs taken at Novi Sad flea market called Najlon (Nylon), and also photographed the objects bought there. The exhibition is complemented by the very objects bought at Nylon. During this time they did a video interview with several sellers, both those who have recently started to work there and those who have been doing this for several decades. Apart from meeting their material or existential needs at the market, their common denominator is that they are all satisfied with their way of life, where most mention good health, their own and of the people close to them, as the main criterion for happiness, ignoring the fact of poor working conditions and low earnings. A flea market operates under a system of free market, where supply and demand determine the price, but it is, like any market, bordered by the value system of a particular group of people. In this system, shaped by the global economy, there is often a need for branded goods, which can easily be found at flea markets, second-hand or good or bad copies, at affordable prices. These goods, because they are cheaper and there is the possibility of haggling, are bought by a large number of citizens of this country whose purchasing power is constantly decreasing, which means that flea markets will survive despite the competition of modern shopping malls. Even the increasingly popular purchase and sales of used things over the Internet does not endanger their survival, it may have even contributed to their popularization.

In the artistic practice of MP_art the relationship between art and life is strongly present and at the beginning of their joint creativity they dealt with intimate and universal themes of male-female relationships. In recent years, they have been reacting more and more to the current social and political challenges, thus in their works they criticize and interpret social phenomena and processes. Observing and exploring the functioning of a micro-world at Novi Sad flea market, they analyze a much wider problem of global functioning of the economy and its impact on individuals. With exhibition NYLON_Friday morning-happy-people, they singled out one segment of everyday life, which might have been understandable to us and they made us wonder what kind of values ​​we as a society aspire to, who forms them and who should form them, and to what extent these established values ​​influence the development and the fate of society and the man in it. Because happiness is an individual thing and depends on that established system of values ​​and only when we manage to achieve them, are we able to experience it.

Slavica Popov