Interdependent Cultural Workers

Interdependent Cultural Workers
What and who does your artistic practice depend on? Who nourishes your criticality? What supports you to study? Who cares for your working body?
This two day workshop focuses on interdependence as a set of relations and a political perspective that thwarts the racial capitalist myth of independence, bringing into view the vast and sophisticated networks that sustain each of us.

Artists are reliant on many others in order to develop their art practice. We also depend on working in and across different fields of work to survive. By nursing, teaching, bike couriering, waitressing, cleaning, administrating, building - we develop knowledge and connection with communities, colleagues and contexts that constantly inform our artistic expressions.
Founded on individualism, the art world often disavows our inherent interdependence,  ignoring the wider networks that support artists’ lives beyond the cultural field and its institutions. This dynamic sures up privilege and hierarchies that are rooted in heteropatriarchy and racial capitalism, and can neglect the creative potential artists have as archives and agents of cross-worker experience and struggle.

Through collective investigation, discussion and reflection we will explore the figure of the artist as an interdependent cultural worker and the rich political and social practice this is informed by and opens us up to.

Jenny Richards' research focuses on the politics of work, health and the body developed through collaborative and collective practice. She is a doctoral candidate on the KTD programme at Konstfack and KTH. My project 'Against(ing) Outsourced Bodies of Care' examines the effect and resistance to the expansion of commercialized, individualized and outsourced care. She was previously co-director of Konsthall C, Stockholm where together with Anna Ahlstrand and Jens Strandberg they developed Home Works, an exhibition programme exploring the politics of domestic work and the home. She collaborates with Johnny Chang on developing the platform 'Gathering Against', an online and physical tool library which gathers resources for collective practice. Manual Labours, initiated in 2012 is an ongoing collaborative research project with Sophie Hope investigating physical relationship to work.
www.manuallabours.co.uk

Dr Lina Džuverović is a curator and academic based in London. She is the Course Leader of the MA Curating and Collections at Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts, London. Most recently (2024) she co-curated the 60th October Salon, Hope is a Discipline, Belgrade, Serbia, a major biennial exhibition. Since 2019, Lina's research has centered on explorations of gendered divisions of labour within art collectives under the umbrella project And Others: The Gendered Politics and Practices of Art Collectives. The project  has assembled an international network of cultural workers and includes an annual ‘And Others Curatorial Lab’ with MA Curating and Collections students. And Others has been funded by the Birkbeck School of Arts strategic research funds and a Faculty Grant by the Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College.

Sarah Browne is an artist based in Ireland concerned with spoken and unspoken, bodily experiences of knowledge, labour and justice. Her practice involves sculpture, film, performance and public projects, often in collaboration with others. Recent projects include Buttercup (2024, solo exhibition at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh); Echo’s Bones (2022: a collaborative film-making project with autistic young people in North Dublin, responding to the work of Samuel Beckett); Public feeling (2019: public art commission in South Dublin leisure centres); Report to an Academy, Marabouparken, Stockholm (2017), Hand to Mouth at CCA Derry~Londonderry & Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and The Invisible Limb, basis, Frankfurt (both 2014). In 2020 she curated TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, with a project titled The Law is a White Dog.