Dialogue
05.12.18

Never (Off) Work!

the Glashuset, Valand Academy

Participants

Felicity AllenDave BeechBenjamin FallonKarin HanssonWinnie HerbsteinKirsteen MacdonaldShona MacnaughtonKelvin Kyungkun ParkBjörn PerborgJenny RichardsJ RohsuperconductrMarina Vishmidt

Led by Dave Beech, Valand Academy, with editors Marina Vishmidt and Benjamin Fallon and Kirsteen Macdonald (Chapter Thirteen).

Work has become an urgent topic for the arts, humanities and the social sciences. The distinction between work and leisure has been smudged by new work patterns, new technologies that keep the worker permanently on the job, and by the extension of claims to what kind of activities ought to be waged. Within this the artist has been reclassified, no longer as an exception to capitalist work but as an exemplar of the 24/7 worker. This has also led to the recognition of a wide community of workers who support, supply and sustain artistic work. This dialogue and screening will explore the artworld as a workplace and the various ways in which art and work intersect.

The event is free and open to the public, no sign up required. The dialogue will be in English.

Contributors

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Felicity Allen

Biography coming soon

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Dave Beech

Dr Dave Beech is Reader in Art and Marxism at the University of the Arts, London. He is the author of Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics(Brill 2015), which was shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize. His most recent books Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production(Pluto 2019) and Art and Labour:On the Hostility to Handicraft, Aesthetic Labour and the Politics of Work in Art(Brill 2020) re-construct art’s historical hostility to capitalism. Beech is an artist who worked in the collective Freee (with Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan) between 2004 and 2018. His current art practice translates the tradition of critical documentary film into sequences of prints that combine photomontage and text art.

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Benjamin Fallon

Benjamin Fallon is an independent curator, writer and designer. He was a founding member of Chapter Thirteen, a co-operative and project space conceived to explore the social, critical and material potentials of the curatorial. Previously he acted as a co-director of Embassy, Edinburgh (2009-2010). Previous projects include Let’s Get Together and Call Ourselves an Institute, Chapter Thirteen (2017-18), the exhibition and publication To The Reader at Basis Voor Actuelle Kunst, Utrecht as part of Impakt Festival’s 25th edition (2013). As a participant of the programme CuratorLab at Konstfack in Stockholm he developed the programme You Are Just in the Middle of the Beginning (2012).

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Karin Hansson

Karin Hansson is an artist and media researcher based in Stockholm. She currently works as a researcher at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and at the Department of Computer & Systems Sciences at Stockholm University. Her research focus is on participatory processes online and the social production of data. She is also interested in artistic methodologies and participatory research methods. Her current research project “Work a work”, in collaboration with artists and union activists, explores the ongoing transformation of work relations from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her work is published in international journals and at conferences such as CHI, CSCW, HICSS, ISEA, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, First Monday and Footprint, among others. She was one of the founders of the Association for Temporary Art, an experimental platform for art in Stockholm, and of the media lab CRAC – Creative Room For Computing.

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Winnie Herbstein

Biography coming soon

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Kirsteen Macdonald

Kirsteen Macdonald is co-founder of the curatorial co-operative Chapter Thirteen. Since 2011 she has developed a series of ongoing discursive platforms for curators including Framework and the peer-learning project Curatorial Studio supported by the Scottish Contemporary Art Network. As an independent curator she co-organised What’s Love Got To Do With It? with philosopher Vanessa Brito presented at Galerie Art-Cade in Marseille in May 2018, and has been employed by Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art (2009-12), Timespan in Helmsdale, Sutherland, Scotland (2010-12) and The Barn, Banchory, Aberdeenshire (2012-13). Between 2014-18 she was Lecturer in Design, History & Theory at the Glasgow School of Art. Her current AHRC funded doctoral research at the GSA explores the curatorial as both dependent on, and a form of, co-operative infrastructure. She is a member of the Advisory Board for Lux Scotland and was previously director of The Changing Room in Stirling (2001-09).

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Shona Macnaughton

Shona Macnaughton (UK) is an artist whose practice is rooted in performance, writing and film, and questions of technology, subjectivity and labour, staging reenactments of the relationships between characters, making scripts and actions which are set up to confront an audience.

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Kelvin Kyungkun Park

Biography coming soon

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Björn Perborg

Biography coming soon

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Jenny Richards

Biography coming soon

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J Roh

Biography coming soon

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superconductr

superconductr is an artistic research project into structural conditions and contradictions of on-demand labour distributed through digital platforms. superconductr’s work aims to make these visible through artistic methods including delegated performance and interventions that utilise the functionalities of existing digital labour platforms, through participation in activism for precarious workers’ rights, and through theoretical investigations. The name superconductr refers to Michel Foucault’s description of power as the conduct of conduct, which here takes into account conduction as the transmission, control and mining of data streams in networks that facilitate the mobilisation, capture and extraction of human labour power. superconductr is a project by artist Matthias Kispert, a practice-based PhD candidate at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster that is tuned into collective flows, connected to and involved in building cooperative assemblages.

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Marina Vishmidt

Marina Vishmidt is a London-based writer, editor and critic occupied mainly with questions around art, labour and value. She is the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production (Brill, early 2016) and A for Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Textem, late 2014). She often works with artists and contributes to journals such as Mute, Afterall, Texte zur Kunst, Ephemera, Kaleidoscope, Parkett, and OPEN! as well as co-/edited collections and catalogues, most recentlyAnguish Language (anguishlanguage.tumbr.com). She has authored chapters in The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics (Routledge, forthcoming) and The ECONOMY Reader (University of Liverpool Press, forthcoming).
She has taught individually or as part of a collective at University of the Arts, Berlin, Central Saint Martins, Goldsmiths, the Royal Academy, Copenhagen and the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem. Her work on debt, social reproduction and artistic enterpreneurialism can be found on libcom.org and in the e-flux journal, and she has also lectured and given workshops on these topics in universities, art institutions and activist spaces.
Vishmidt also has a long-term involvement with artists’ moving image in critical and exhibition contexts such as feminist film distributor Cinenova and the free cinema Full Unemployment Cinema.

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