по-русски українською Welcome to the LABOUR...

Welcome to the LABOUR SHOW!

Once upon a time, we worshipped at Labour’s feet.

In the 20th century, she led the pantheon of artistic representation time and time again. Resplendent with the saintly soul of the underdog, images of her workers were splashed all over the newspapers, theysurfaced in the most optimistic news items, they bled through the sides of buildings, like austere ornaments.

But today, Labour – or should we say, real work –floats in front of us like an outcast from the heavens. We’ve hardly noticed that our battle with Labour’s faces has ended with a rout of herfinal images, that we’ve shoved them somewhere off stage, behind the scenes of the capitalist production line.

Labour isn’t just no longer of interest to us – she simply doesn’t fit the bill. She sticks out like a sore thumb. Wherever the stage lights shine on today’s goods, to make them glow with sacred importance, she’s frankly, well - an embarrassment.

Yet our rebellion against Labour’s might didn’t end with release from her oppressive, tormenting grip. Instead it simply left us with another massive drop in her status, which in any case was always ambivalent – we’ve crowded Labour out of our field of view.

Judging by appearances, our world today is custom-made, it’s artificial, and it can get by fine without ever having toact alongside the stuff from which it’s made, let alone the ways it’s made, or the people who make it.

The Soviet days lie behind us: idealised milkmaids no longer smile at us from our television screens. Yet together with their disappearance, as if theyjust walked away across the land, a few other representative links have also receded from the foreground of production and the manufacturing of material goods.

Labour, as she migrates to the faraway fields of the humdrum, where she works away unseen, is becoming mysterious and inscrutable, although she’s no less matter-of-fact.

HUDRADA, the curatorial union, invites you to come and see a show whose name sounds a bit anachronistic – the “LABOUR SHOW”.

Here you will be able to come face to face with the people who, thanks to the willpower of today’s capitalist ideologies, have become faceless and unreal, people who’ve become so fantastical, that they’ve relinquished all form of control, of exploitation, of self-exploitation.

Here, you’ll be able to see the faces behind labour, faces which are gradually and definitively migrating further from the field of the consciousness towards the unconscious, towards the field of dreams. The labours of the artist, to whom a separate thematic line of the exhibition is dedicated, shake off the fetters of the dream-world, and allow the worker to perform simultaneously in the role of labour’s muse.

In today’s world, really only Art can lead Labour back into the footlights. No other visual means has what it takes.

Taking part in the exhibition are:

Yevgenia Belorusets, Nikita Kadan, Lesia Khomenko Yulia Kostereva, Yuriy Kruchak, Vladimir Kusnetsov, Vladimir Logutov, Nikolai Matsenko, Lada Nakonechna, R.E.P., Oleksiy Salmanov, Oleksiy Say, Anna Zvyagintseva, TanzLaboratorium (Ukraine), Stephan Burger (Switzerland), Lucia Nimcova (Slovakia), Aleksandra Galkina, Nikolai Oleynikov, Sergey Sapozhnikov, David Ter-Oganyan (Russia), Mladen Stilinovic (Croatia).

The LABOUR SHOW Exhibition opens Wednesday the 16^th of November, at 18.00.

LABOUR SHOW will run from the 17^th of November to the 2^nd of December 2011 on weekdays from 10:00 to 18:00 at the following address:

Visual Culture Research Centre,

National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy,

Old Academic Campus, Ground Floor, 2 Skovorody St., Kyiv

(metro: KontraktovaPloschad)

http://vcrc.ukma.kiev.ua/en/

A further press-release will be distributed regarding the parallel programme.

The exhibition has been made possible thanks to the kind support of:

Tranzit.org, ERSTE Stiftung, Visual Culture Research Centre , Foundation CCA , MediaLab

Media partners:

Springerin, Labourarchive, Проstory