Future of Work: Letters from the Land and Water
Alvin Luong
Audie Murray
Jagdeep Raina
Sindhu Thirumalaisamy
Curated by Simranpreet Anand and Srimoyee Mitra
August 31 – December 16, 2022
Opening Reception: Friday September 9, 7 - 9pm.
The Future of Work is a three-part exhibition series formed as sites of continual research on the labour movements, essential work, equity, and mobility. In collaboration with the Art Gallery of Burlington, the exhibitions are a process to examine how the pandemic has affected labour markets and quality of life. The curatorial collective of Suzanne Carte, Srimoyee Mitra, Simranpreet Anand, and Adrienne Huard have created three distinct platforms for conversations surrounding precarious labour, parallel economies, and labour futurisms.
At WAHC, The Future of Work: Letters from the Land and Water brings together works by Alvin Luong, Audie Murray, Jagdeep Raina and Sindhu Thirumalaisamy, and probes the intersections between material culture, the natural environment, and economies that surround them. Their methodologies range between painting, video, sculpture, and embroidery. Each navigates the reality of unstable living and working conditions that reveals the precarity of labour that has been propelled by global capitalism with local repercussions and fallout.
The culture of violence and volatility embedded in precarious work is echoed by the artists in the following ways: Thirumalaisamy’s experimental film The Lake and the Lake exposes the discrepancies between Bangalore’s technology boom-propelled luxury culture and the lives of those who live beyond the walls of the towering “Silicon Valley of India”. Raina’s archival references lay bare the working conditions that Punjabi farmers have endured in both Punjab and Canada in the age of mechanised farming. Both Raina and Murray’s intricate use of handiwork reflects the reclamation of practices that include beadwork, phulkari and dhurrie that have been interrupted through colonial industrial violence. Murray’s work responds to the capitalist structure that has monetized Indigenous arts and crafts; her beading of gloves and other everyday objects are an act of reclamation and resistance. These haptic qualities continue to resonate throughout Luong’s work with a hand-tied life vest made of buoyant meatballs. Luong’s work invokes the freighters along the South China Sea and confronts us with the entangled and complex histories of food, migration and labour.
WAHC wishes to acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Hamilton, the Province of Ontario, CUPE, the Provincial Building and Construction Trades Council of Ontario, the Canada Council for the Arts, OSSTF and ONA for their support of our exhibitions and ancillary programs.
For more information, please contact Sonali Menezes at (905) 522-3003 ex. 29 or sonali@wahc-museum.ca
51 Stuart Street | Hamilton, Ontario | (905) 522-3003
Open Wednesday to Friday 10 am – 4 pm and Saturdays 12 pm – 4 pm
Our building is physically accessible.
https://www.wahc-museum.ca
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