At Your Service – Art and Labour
27 March–30 September 2104
An exhibition by the Technisches Museum Wien and ERSTE Foundation
Tehnički muzej Zagreb
Savska cesta 18
10000 Zagreb
Croatia
After successful presentations in Vienna and Steyr, the exhibition At Your Service – Art and Labour comes to the Tehnički muzej in Zagreb. An initiative of the Technisches Museum Wien and ERSTE Foundation, the exhibition opens a new area of artistic discourse, engaging technology and art in a dialogue and analysing multiple aspects of labour in the context of the current economic and social crisis in Central and Eastern Europe. The exhibition illustrates the artists’ approaches on the rapid transformation of labour processes, with a focus on the impact of mechanisation on people’s lives. The initiative brings in discussion both the opportunities and the risks of contemporary labour forms.
The exhibition opens at the Technical Museum in Zagreb on 27 March at 7pm and can be visited until 30 September 2014. The opening includes a performance by Moldovan artist Pavel Braila, who brings a tribute to the typewriter, inviting people skilled in typing to simultaneously perform on old typewriter machines. The same intervention was performed at the exhibition’s opening in Austria, and its video was awarded with the Celeste Prize 2013 in the category Animation & Video.
For the exhibition, artists Pavel Braila, Anna Jermolaewa, Daniel Knorr and Ulrike Lienbacher were invited to produce artworks on the theme of labour, which are to be integrated into the Museum’s permanent exhibition as art interventions. Videos by Harun Farocki, Adrian Paci and Anne Tallentire complement the spectrum.
The artists pointedly address a range of topical issues: How is labour changing? When is it a privilege, and when is it a burden? What does it mean when workflows are automated? Is our knowledge-based society and service economy the future of our working life? What does it mean to be flexible and mobile? How do work and unemployment affect the way we perceive ourselves? Work affects everyone and opinions about it are many and diverse. Paid labour is largely considered a social good, providing the opportunity for social recognition, and thereby serves as an important aspect in personal identity.
At Your Service – Art and Labour sets technology in a dialogue with art. For a museum that rests on a scientific basis, providing room for art is seen as an option for bringing in unfamiliar, outside perspectives, and thereby reactivating the discussions about opportunities and risks of contemporary forms of labour. Rather than being placed in a special exhibition space, art is positioned as an intervention in the Museum’s permanent presentations and visitors are confronted with unexpected perspectives. Red chairs with covers made from recycled clothing and floor stickers lead the way to the various exhibition areas and link the artistic positions to each other. They are core elements of the guidance system designed by Walking Chair Design Studio.
Project Team, Technisches Museum Wien: Elisabeth Limbeck-Lilienau, Christine Lixl, Roswitha Muttenthaler
Curators: Silvia Eiblmayr (curator and member of the art advisory council of Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Group and ERSTE Foundation) and Christiane Erharter (curator at Programme Culture, ERSTE Foundation)
Catalogue available with documentation of the art works and texts by Peter Fleissner, Sabine Hess, Nataša Ilić. Published by Fotohof edition, Salzburg, 2012. ISBN: 978-3-902675-79-8
Press contacts:
Markita Franulić, Director of Tehnički muzej Zagreb
T + 385 1 4881615 / markita.franulic@tehnicki-muzej.hr
Andreea Gurau, ERSTE Foundation Communications
T +43 664 8425 425 / www.erstestiftung.org
