VAT Free Bags

The VAT Free Bags are by artist Gizem Üstüner, part of her series Low-Budget Projects. Low-Budget Projects concerns the precarious aspect of the everyday politics of freelance life, such as the stress of an unpaid bill or rent, an overdue visa application fee or invoice, a rejected or unanswered funding proposal, an imbalance of many side jobs with temporary or no contracts, a negotiation with an employer for fair paid hours, and many more.

Holding regular gatherings after each tax quarter, Low-Budget Projects opens up space for skill-sharing and invites freelancers from different backgrounds to discuss possibilities of self-governance in the existing economic and political infrastructures of the cultural field.

Rather than seeking solutions to larger problems, the project aims to serve urgent responses to survive precarity on a daily basis, whilst looking at various forms of resistance practised by many art and cultural workers. It focuses on understanding and redefining these hidden dramas, and calls attention to the actual financial streams that fund a cultural practice.

Photo by Lin Chun Yao