LONDON — In the United Kingdom, “hard graft” is a colloquialism that refers to hard, extensive and fair labor. A performance of the same name at the Wellcome Collection marks the institute’s latest attempt to explore the links between health and social stratification. A wealth of audio commentary, contemporary works and slow-moving films alongside historical art and archival material force us to confront the harmful conditions in which many workers live, work and suffer. The exhibition, in turn, requires a little effort from the visitor.
For example, the apparent seating comfort around the gallery is purely physical. There is nothing easy about learning that an industrial-scale proliferation of chemical plants on former Louisiana plantation lands is causing cancer among local black working-class communities, many of whom are descendants of enslaved people. The research group Forensic architecture asks the question in the title of their film: “If toxic air is a monument to slavery, how can we take it down?” (2021). This exposition of the sickening inhumanity of capitalism is made with the clinical approach that characterizes all of the collective’s work.
American artist and activist Sheila Pinkel finds a legacy of slavery still alive and well in the American penal system. In several states, inmates manufacture furniture that is then sold to government buildings universities. Pinkel evokes a grim scholarship Site / Unseen: the prison-industrial complex (1998–2024), a series of photographs of these items, taken from a catalog she discovered of objects made in California prisons 2001. Desks, chairs and racks poignantly show the invisible lives of people behind bars and evoke them in the exhibition space. A sign reading “no photography” next to this Wellcome piece, somehow quite appropriately, is reminiscent of classified material.
‘Our Journey’ (2019) draws a connection to Britain and highlights the unchecked mistreatment and abuse of live-in domestic workers, which is considered ‘modern slavery’ by numerous human rights organizations. The film plays the story honestly and presents testimonies of twelve traumatized workers who are shot at close range. The project, which invited workers to collaborate with scientists Joyce Jiang and Tassia Kobylinska over the course of four months, was bitterly moving.
Despite the grit and realism of these pieces, Hard grave no lack of imagination. Money makes the world go round (2024) brings together dozens of ceramic works, piggy banks and a stage-like cathedral setting that references historical church occupations led by sex workers in 1975 And 1982. In an arched window where you might expect to see stained glass windows, non-binary actor and author Mendez appears on film to deliver a sermon recounting their arrival in London and their transition to sex work, in honor of the long history of the profession and the movement calling for rights and sex work. protections.
The Wellcome Collection is the exhibition space of a charitable foundation committed to better medical science and environmental health, which sounds like a very safe, fundable mission. But with Hard gravecurator Cindy Cissokho has shown that art around health does not have to be neutral and anodyne. In fact, it should be the exact opposite: political and stimulating. This exhibition is usually difficult to view, and that may indeed be the only result of an investigation into the most unfavorable and unjust working conditions on our planet.
Hard Graft: work, health and rights continues at the Wellcome Collection (183 Euston Road, London, United Kingdom) until April 27, 2025. The exhibition was organized by Cindy Sissokho.
