EXHIBITION: 01.01.2018 – 01.11.2018
”Labour and Materials” – Group show with Katrin Korfmann
LOCATION: 21C, Bentonville, USA
Participating artists: Katrin Korfmann, Alejandro Cartagena, Pieter Hugo, Katrin Korfmann, Zanele Muholi, Kara Walker and others
Exploring the evolution of industry in the 21st century, Labor&Materials presents a precarious balance between promise and peril. The scale, scope, and speed of technological innovation heralds unprecedented changes in what, how, where, and by whom goods and services are produced and provided. Economists describe the explosion of radically new platforms and products emerging in the digital age—robots and other forms of automated labor, self-driving cars, three-dimensional printing, the explosion of bits and pixels transmitted across the internet, and the growing global network of trade driven by the shipping container—as an inflection point: a time in human history when how we live and work is utterly transformed. What does an inflection point look like? How will the widespread transformation of commerce and consumption affect access to goods and jobs, to information and infrastructure?
From photographs of today’s living and working conditions by Katrin Korfmann, Alejandro Cartagena, Pieter Hugo, and Zanele Muholi, to portraits of those laboring in 21st-century fields, homes, factories, and mines by Lina Puerta, Pierre Gonnord, Serge Alain Nitegeka, and Ramiro Gomez, to fantastical visions of a world defined by data and digitization by Karine Giboulo, Chen Jiagang, and Gonzalo Lebrija, the imagery on view is both nostalgic and futuristic. As today’s primary means of production, the computer, becomes better, faster, stronger every day, more material and digital goods are made, shipped, transmitted, used, reused, and discarded, evoking concerns about environmental degradation and socio-economic inequities.
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