PinchukArtCentre February 9 – May 2020 (Exhibition of the 20 Artists Shortlisted
for the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2020)

Acknowledgments to Friederike Steinert, Asija Ismailovski, Eva Kovac, Roman Shlyakhta, Oğuzhan Sezer, Vadym Kravchuk.

Sound Antonio Losa

How we move defines the age we’re living in. If the early 20th-century pattern of movements was very precise and monotonous, acquired on factories and rarely changed its variety, then nowadays pattern is random, quick, and chaotic. In a consumer society we are living, one borrows their body temporarily to adjust for a profession needed for a day or a few hours in order then to go back to their main identity. The performance of those job identities is done with such excellence that one has to control when the switch occurs.

Since a long time movements connected to invisible labor, staging a choreography and automatization of everyday interests me in my practice. “The choreography of labor” consists of two parts, participatory-performative and painterly.

The everyday job that one temporary or permanently has leaves traces in our muscular and mental apparatus and is slowly turned into a pattern of automatically performed movements. When does this movement become an extension of your body, a choreography? It is a never wanted skill a body acquires to its new vocabulary. In the project, I’m creating an extended collection, a dictionary of some sort of the people’s personal labor history, that are in the art industry. A variety of the movements are significantly unconnected professionally and among themselves present a set of abstract chaotic maps. I attempted to visualize and to structure the contemporary state of labor through the collection of these very personal movements.

The first part of the project is a collaboration, together with participants who borrowed their movements to me, we created a separate chronological choreography of their labor, dealing with the objects I would create for this occasion. As in Freud’s “remembering repeating and working through” theory which later developed into a gestalt practice the repetition of movements and working through it will serve as a healing process and catharsis. In the second part the choreography turned into the painting with elements such as french fries frying, guarding the museum exposition, phrases of rejections, or handshakes moved from the field of performance to the field of painting.