Roulette

Marina Abramović Institute in dialogue with Josepf Beuys Foundation 
at Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau, Germany

Group show opening: 13.07.2025

Description:

Roulette is a performative installation that materializes the tension between labor, chance, and systemic control. Set within an industrialized workspace, the performer engages in a repetitive cycle of production, dictated by the arbitrary logic of a lotto machine. The work highlights the alienation of labor, the erosion of workers’ rights, and the illusion of choice within capitalist structures. The installation features a work station equipped with a pill press machine, sugar powder, and packaging materials, contrasting with a minimal break space furnished with a chair, instant noodles, and an iPad playing Joseph Beuys’ Monologue. The performer operates in a looped sequence, caught between mechanized work and fleeting moments of reprieve determined by a rigged system of chance.

Roulette draws from historical and contemporary labor models, referencing Joseph Beuys’ Wirtschaftswertprinzip and Monologue, both of which address commodification, labor value, and economic structures. The lotto machine, a direct nod to Beuys’ Honey Pump at the Workplace, functions as an absurd mechanism of control, simulating the unpredictable yet structured nature of labor cycles. Historically, lottery systems were designed to fund public goods, but in Roulette, it becomes a privatized, coercive force dictating the worker’s fate, much like the modern gig economy.

The performer’s actions, pressing sugar into pills, packaging, and deconstructing them, reflect cycles of production and destruction, critiquing the notion of value creation within industrial and digital economies. The pills serve as a dual symbol of commodity: they mimic pharmaceuticals, invoking corporate monopolization of health, while simultaneously being sugar, a historically politicized product tied to labor exploitation and colonialism.

The break space functions as a symbolic zone of optimization, instant noodles represent efficiency-driven consumption, while the minimal toilet conditions point to gendered labor inequalities and bodily regulation. These elements extend the critique to interspecies relationships, but rather than focusing on human-animal, Roulette foregrounds the human-AI dynamic, drawing from the Turing Test and Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (seen through a feminist lens, the Turing-style question  “Who is granted the status of a subject?” echoes long-standing struggles for women’s full political and social recognition. Both female-identifying humans and AI systems are asked to prove their legitimacy inside rules they did not write, and that similarity opens a rights-based conversation) . 
The performer is controlled by an unseen voice an AI-like entity dictating her breaks and productivity targets mirroring the contemporary automation of human labor.The performer must meet a quota of packed boxes per cycle, with failures resulting in punitive measures dictated by the AI voice.
Roulette reveals the precarious intersection of labor, automation, and economic control, where individual agency is reduced to the whim of an engineered system masquerading as randomness. By engaging with historical labor critiques and contemporary digital economies, the installation underscores the transition from industrial mechanization to digital optimization, questioning whether workers have ever truly escaped the roulette wheel of systemic exploitation.

In its references to Joseph Beuys and contemporary labor conditions, Roulette becomes a mirror to a society where work is both necessary and absurd, where workers exist within systems they cannot control, and where the promise of freedom remains just beyond reach.

For more details please have a look at the exhibition flyer in the links below:

Performer: Cristiana Negoescu

Links:

• Event Announcement Museum Schoss Moyland website

Back to Performance Main Page