Working yourself into the ground
* Washerwoman, Shannon Alonzo, 2018. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo Kibwe Brathwaite
Daniel Nelson
“All jobs bring honor and nobility, even work that is socially discounted or demeaned,’ read a US Labor Day message I once read. A new exhibition, Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights, looks at the underside of that message.
The blurb of the Wellcome Trust show is more direct: “Making connections between undervalued labour, the people who do it, and the spaces where it happens, this exhibition brings into focus the people whose health, work and rights remain hidden on the margins of society.”
It’s split into three sections: The Plantation, seeded by colonialism and slavery and still flourishing; The Street, including sanitation workers but dominated by an altar to sexwork; and Home, as a workplace for women.
Prison in the US and UK gets a dishonourable spotlight. It draws attention to the links between slavery, plantations, discrimination against Black prisoners, and low pay for prison labour (an average of £4 per week in the UK).
There’s also a multimedia installation on domestic workers, and a powerful video of testimonies by a few of the 23,000 migrants who come to Britain every year to work in peoples’ homes: their tales of abuse, modern-day slavery and hostile bureaucracy are appalling.
Curator Cindy Sissokho also offers hope, whether in the celebratory showcasing of enslaved people’s acts of resistance and freedom through herbal medicine and food knowledge or Bouba Toure’s photographs of the migrant-led movements in France that led to an improvement of workers’ rights and recognition of thousands of undocumented migrants “despite the ongoing rise of hostile immigration laws”.
The exhibition contains more than 150 objects, in the form of film, sculpture, sound and multimedia installation, from countries including Bangladesh, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Sudan and Trinidad. There’s much to peruse and ponder, but it feels a little too tasteful, too restrained, too confined to burst out of its gallery confines and erupt into fierce, violent anger about the continued flourishing of so much cruel, lethal exploitation.
Sissokho clearly has a carefully thought-out vision, one that some non-academic visitors might find unexpectedly confined. She doesn’t go for showmanship — or rather, she goes for controlled showmanship — but if you take your time you’ll reap reward. It’s worth putting the work in.
Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights, free, is at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE, until 27 April. Info: wellcomecollection.org
Related events include:
+ 2 October, Women’s Bodies and Work, panel discussion, 7-8.30pm
+ 27 October, Care Chains (Love will continue to resonate), artist Moi Tran and members of the Voice of Domestic Workers, performance, Q&A, workshop exploring performance, 2-4pm
+ A series of five talks and tours on Thursday evenings throughout October as part of Black History Month: https://wellcomecollection.org/events/ZtBLZBEAACQAIulk