WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY: Freja Hallberg

PERFORMED BY:
Vanja Ejdus
Milica Stefanović

COSTUME DESIGN: Maja Mirković

COMPOSER: Anton Alfven

LIGHT DESIGN: Nađa Vukorep

TRANSLATION FROM SWEDISH: Nikola Pušičić and Vesna Stanišić

DRAMATURGICAL ASSISTANCE: Jana Milivojević

PHOTOGRAPHY: Miša Obradović

VISUAL IDENITITY: Jana Oršolić

COSTUME MAKING: Vesa Karanović and Gabrijela Knežević

HAIR AND MAKE-UP: Marija Stošić

PRODUCTION: SWEETS / HEARTEFACT, 2025

PREMIERE: 27 NOVEMBER 2025, Heartefact House, Belgrade 

*This production is created in partnership between SWEETS/PotatoPotato (Sweden) and Heartefact (Serbia), with the support of the Swedish Institute.

 

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

I run a theatre in Stockholm and work every day with the paradox the art world prefers to pretend doesn’t exist: the extremely intimate relationship between art and money. They are inseparable and yet seem to live in entirely different solar systems. Art wants to be free, irrational, unpredictable. Money demands structure, control, measurability. But in practice no artistic process survives without capital – just as capital without artistic imagination has no direction, no meaning, no ability to create a future. This is an issue that is both timeless and nationless. The relations between creation and survival, between desire and dependency, look different in every society but are always driven by the same undercurrents: power, guilt, compromise, longing. It is a drama unfolding just beneath the surface, regardless of language, currency, or era.

I have tried to deepen this question through an impossible love story. To me, the tension between art and money is not only something that concerns institutions, organisations, or infrastructures – it exists inside every person’s daily life. We all live within it. In how we prioritise, how we count, how we compromise, how we value our time, our desire, our bodies, our work. Economic logic and artistic logic are not external forces; they sit inside us. That is why I wanted to write a relationship where these two forces are not metaphors but actual bodies trying to love each other, despite not speaking the same language. A couple in which power shifts, where dependency is mutual, where pride and shame go hand in hand. Rehearsing this production with Serbian actors, during the same period the national theatre closed, made the question more urgent than I first imagined. What began as a philosophical inquiry – an existential relationship between art and capital – suddenly expanded into practical politics. We found ourselves in a situation where artistic work was not an idea but something threatened concretely, materially, institutionally. The rehearsals in Belgrade gave the play a different weight, as if reality began to speak back.

The dresses by Maja Mirkovic are not costumes in traditionell mening – they are architecture, obstacles, tools, extensions of the two forces on scen. They shape the movement, the sound, the intimacy and the conflict. Bodies inside systems. Systems inside bodies. Art and Money is not a pamphlet and not a solution. It is a confession. A love story between two forces that both need and destroy each other. A portrait of all of us – how we try to live, create, and survive in a world that demands everything to be measured, valued, and sold, while the most important things we have are the ones that cannot be counted. – Freja Hallberg

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND DIRECTOR

Freja Hallberg is a Swedish director and author who doesn’t write plays — she composes them. Her works emerge where performance meets philosophy and politics — raw, emotionally precise, and formally unexpected. Her pieces do not follow a narrative arc, but rhythm, rupture, repetition. She does not write for a protagonist, but for polyphony. Not for a lesson, but for a shared space. Not for a voice, but for a chorus.

She is the founder of the Swedish company PotatoPotato, runs the international platform SWEETS, and manages KONTRÄR — a stage for radical performances in Stockholm, through which she has, for two decades, not only created new artistic works but also built the conditions for their very possibility. Her performances often begin with something simple — a pile of receipts, a wedding between strangers, a long-forgotten apology — and grow into dense, absurd, sometimes devastating worlds that are often humorous, sometimes brutal, but always sincere.

With the Belgrade premiere at Heartefact House, she begins a new, international phase of her artistic work.

CRITICS

In addition to an intriguing directorial concept, its main artistic strength lies in the outstanding performances of Vanja Ejdus and Milica Stefanović. It is finely stylized, develops a subtle (self-)ironic distance, and is mathematically precise; the actresses’ actions and lines are flawlessly interlaced, flowing seamlessly from one to another, like in a musical or choreographic score.

Ivan Medenica, Radar

There is something unmistakably Beckettian about the performance also has more to do with Freja Hallberg’s direction than the text. After previously, among other things, exploring the logic and pleasure of quarrelling in the four-hour performance “Bråk” (“Fight”), her “Art & Money” constitutes a more concentrated verbal sparring in which the absurd lies in glances and gestures, as well as in a studied apple-eating.

Anna Håkansson, Dagens Nyheter. (Sweden)

“Art & Money” is a sublime exploration of the inescapable relationship between art and capital, an existential theatre of states at its best, illuminating capital’s desire for something that in itself cannot be bought with money: creativity.

Ylva Lagercrantz Spindler, Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden)

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