Imagine you’re in 1990s Yugoslavia, which is beset by wars of independence, wreaking havoc on everyday life. With an inflation rate of 313 billion per cent, currency is essentially meaningless. Bombings seem to occur at scheduled times, leaving little room for peace. The conflicts are remembered as particularly devastating in European history, marked by many war crimes, including genocide, massacres, and mass wartime rape. Strangely, art offered a sense of escape, of connection and calmness in these turbulent times. At least in the world as Serbian artist Irena Haiduk experienced it, growing up in Belgrade during the NATO strikes of the 1990s. This experience informs the world she envisions for her ongoing project, Nula, set in a parallel timeline that mirrors the socioeconomic conditions of 1990s Yugoslavia.

Staged at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, under the curatorial direction of X Zhu-Nowell, to be able to enter the exhibition, you must conduct a more meaningful transaction than simply purchasing a ticket. You must agree to don a whole new character and immerse yourself in the world Haiduk creates. The project—expansive in its hybridity—encompasses a solo exhibition at the Shanghai-based institute, a debut film shot on location at the museum, and an autofictional novel co-written by Haiduk and Blakey Bessire. It depicts a world ravaged by war at the brink of collapse, and three main characters who must make sense of this world and survive. In many ways, the fictional world, as described in the official release, seems to reflect the anxieties of the 2020s, where we are living through the ongoing annihilation of entire populations, hyperinflation, the climate crisis and ecological destruction.

Haiduk is no stranger to such calamity, and acknowledges in conversation with STIR that the exhibition stems from living with and making sense of this anxiety. "When [disaster] actually arrived, I felt strangely calm and prepared because I've been through it before. So, setting [Nula] in that time and working from that [space was a way to express] how important art is in a time like this," she notes. Taking over two floors of the museum, Haiduk's exhibition makes the world of the autofictional novel material through elaborate scenography. The set designs evoke the atmosphere of a sinister world within which actors perform various roles, and as visitors, you are expected to perform as well. Among the fictional architectures is a cabaret, where the majority of the scenes seem to be set. Haiduk turned the art museum into a stage set and a live production site, with filming for her feature film taking place with the help of actors and visitors from May 15 – June 5, 2025.

As the exhibition press release states, Nula presents an experimental format of engaging with art that "blurs the lines between actors, visitors and accomplices". Visitors must shed their perceptions of the outside world to follow the stories of Anu, a National Bank illustrator, Magi, a statistician and Nula, a teenager. As the narrative progresses, the three characters transform into a forger, a prostitute and bait, adjusting to the psychological and economic pressures evinced by the story. The naming of the project after the third character, the one most removed from the corrupt networks of Haiduk's world, seems to suggest a desire to question value in a world where nothing seems to matter anymore.

As Haiduk elaborates, "[Nula] means zero in many languages. [And, it became] a way of naming the tick and gesture the illustrator had...The addition continues devaluing to zeros. [I wanted to highlight how] money is just representation and when things lose value and societies that are based on financial economies collapse, you realise what society should be grounded on, which, in my opinion, is art." The Nula economy, which underpins the project, highlights this critical stance. As Haiduk underlines, commodity value ought not to be ascribed by money, but through dynamic exchange, through our entanglement with the world. She believes the agency we exercise in creating change means that we begin to understand each other, and that we can begin to create true value.

Nula offers a way to think beyond the imagistic world and arbitrary notions of value. "I'm interested in finding ways to seduce people to want to think about [value] and act in different ways, but also to create a practice of images that is not based on [pervasive digitality]," Haiduk notes. By inviting visitors into her speculative fiction project, the New York-based artist hopes to engender an experience of art that is based on bodily experience and a way to practice agency, controlling what is on view through your own gestures. Haiduk places the value of making art within storytelling and the ability to find kinships. As she states, “[I aimed at] creating a place for people to come together and reacquaint themselves with this idea of agency through constructive images that are not fixed, that are variable, that are embodied, that live on and that change.”

It is our stories that will live on after us, and that is perhaps the emancipation of art. Haiduk’s practice employs storytelling to bring out what she believes to be essential to humanity, critiquing the commodification of experience in the digital age. She tells STIR, "I believe a story can hold much more truth and be truer to people than what they would call a real, true thing." For Haiduk, staging Nula has been one of the most meaningful experiences of her career so far. And in offering a vital reimagining of the role museums can play in the transmission of images, she fosters a new understanding of desire.

The exhibition ‘Nula’ is on view from May 2, 2025 – February 8, 2026, at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China.