©2025 Quelish
THE GAME IS ON. NO LUCK. NO LEGEND.
28.08.26 - 31.08.26
Maison de la Société des Architectes
130 Avenue du Prado
13008 Marseille
JACKPOT
Alissa Abolentseva
Alvise Pi
Amelia Woroszyl
André Baierl
Anna Alexanina
Antoine Traineau
Babette Robertson
Brandon Tong
Charlotte Hennion
Daria Galeeva
Ekaterina Costa
Eva Pracca
Federico Niccolai
Frans van Hoek
Gaia Vincensini
Guilhem Prat
Hugo Langlade
Inês Farah
Italia Bruno
Ivanna Heredia Torres
Julia Bonich
Jules Cartier
Katya Quel
Lara Rocho
Léon Heitz Zambo
Linda Denkert
Lisa Perrot
Luna Fernández
Lyne Caroff
Maël Dupraz Nayak
Miha Majes
Natasha Batby
Nika Lenz
Nicolas Vallat
Paul Betti
Philip Berg
Shai Datauker
Soline Morin
Thibault Cliquet
Adèle Vivet
Ivy Vo
Djoana Weimann,
Josie Overton
Ellinor Aurora Aasgaard
Zayne Armstrong
JACKPOT brings together 45 international artists around chance, desire, risk, value, and the illusions of success.
Across sculpture, painting, installation, photography, performance, video, digital media, and interactive works, the exhibition looks at the mechanisms that shape our aspirations and our collective obsession with “making it.”
Between fantasies of success, status symbols, consumption, belief, identity, and popular culture, the artists gathered in JACKPOT examine the visible and invisible rules of the game we all participate in.
The game is on.
No luck. No legend.
Katya Quel — Artist & Curator
André Baierl — Production
Virgile Bettan — Production, Beverage & Transport Support Lara Rocho — Assistant
JACKPOT imagines the contemporary art world as a casino. We enter with a stake, a reputation, a desire for recognition, and a belief in the possibility of the next turn. Artworks become cards, exhibitions become tables, collectors become players, institutions become referees. Above this economy of signs hangs the promise of the jackpot: the possibility that an encounter, a sale, an exhibition, or a decision might suddenly transform the value of an artwork, a career, or a life.
This fiction connects to a wider reality. Our time organises much of existence around performance, optimisation, and visibility. Life coaches offer methods, algorithms organise encounters, platforms measure attention, and figures of success promise reproducible formulas. Identity becomes a brand, time a resource, and the future an investment. Even uncertainty enters the language of management and strategy.
Chance remains at the centre of these systems. It appears through timing, networks, virality, trends, and accidental encounters. In the art world, value is produced through complex relationships between desire, rarity, narrative, institutional recognition, market forces, and visibility. Merit exists alongside countless circumstances beyond individual control.
The 45 artists gathered in JACKPOT work within this unstable space where values shift. Their practices move through symbols of status, consumer objects, narratives of success, architectures of desire, memory, archives, toys, found materials, language, the body, technology, catastrophe, intimacy, and virtual worlds.
Several works transform ordinary objects into forms charged with renewed value. Abandoned toys become relics of desire; images from popular culture are displaced and recontextualised; fragments of conversations, graffiti, and urban artefacts are sampled, repeated, and put back into circulation. Digital bodies deform, narratives fragment, memories are recomposed. Repetition, displacement, and transformation become ways of unsettling established categories.
This logic connects to the casino: the value of a sign also depends on the frame in which it is presented. Rarity, desire, narrative, institutional legitimacy, and collective recognition all participate in the construction of value. The art market makes this circulation particularly visible, but the same process now runs through culture at large. Images, objects, bodies, identities, and experiences are constantly evaluated, ranked, compared, and made desirable.
JACKPOT looks at this system with a critical, playful, and sensitive attention. The exhibition focuses on the mechanisms that produce belief: promises of success, signs of status, superstitions, strategies, personal narratives, and collective images that give shape to desire.
Against the multiplication of predictions, statistics, advice, and promises of control, art maintains a space for ambiguity. It allows things to remain unstable, contradictory, sometimes useless, sometimes excessive. It circulates forms that escape a single function and an immediately measurable value.
In JACKPOT, the game becomes a way of looking at the present: its economies of desire, systems of belief, mechanisms of visibility, and fantasies of success. The works enter this game with their own rules, their own risks, and their own forms of value.
The game is on. We are already at the table.