The exhibition project focuses on the theme of work, a subject that has been dealt with by both fine and visual art over the past four decades. On the basis of artistic positions from the 1960’s-1970’s to the works from the present day, issues such as women’s work, globalization and globalized gender relations or manifestations of the transition from socialist to capitalist work are addressed.
The majority of the historical positions reflect on the political movements of the Sixties and Seventies from both the perspective of the left and of feminist ideological and social critique. “Work” as a social activity (André Gorz) is revealed to be a social construction and critically interpreted. Here activist forms of art dealing with real-life work situations play an important role. Artists react to the change taking place in this period in work relations, involving “on the one hand a growing destabilization of working conditions as a result of the increasing informal and precarious nature of working conditions” and “on the other hand, the growing polarization of employment possibilities that lead to new differences in social strata.” (Saskia Sassen) This development has given way to various forms of “work“ or “gainful employment” and all their attendant phenomena: part-time labor, tele-work/cottage work, sex work, child labor, woman’s work, “foreign workers” as well as unemployment, strikes.Globalization and the related migration have contributed to a dissolution of the notion of work. Gainful employment has been devalued in the Western industrial nations as a result of the outsourcing of entire industrial sectors to the “cheap-labor countries”. These have been replaced in many instances by poorly paid, precarious working conditions in the service sector.
Apart from this, the integration of technologies in everyday life – enabling, on the one hand, the cited forms of tele/cottage work, part-time labor, etc. and leading, on the other hand, to “network societies“ – has played a crucial role in the change of the notion of work – the flexible individual can no longer clearly distinguish between everyday life and work. (Richard Senett)
The exhibition project brings together works that have been created since the 1960s. Artists use various approaches to deal with the theme of “work”; here the issues are addressed that relate to the change in the notion of work that has taken place as briefly sketched above.
Artists from the following countries have been invited to contribute to the project: China, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, Croatia, Austria, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, South Africa, USA, among others.
This exhibition will be accompanied bya publication, that shall address the subject of working conditions and their changes from a socio-critical, political,as well as from an art historical point of view. Contributions by André Gorz, Katy Deepwell, Marion von Osten, and others are considered.
Literature:
André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, 1980.
Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, 1994.
Barbara Holland-Cunz, Die alte neue Frauenfrage, 2003, S. 193 – 211, S. 204
David Morley, Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall, Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, 1997.
