On Necessary Work | Exhibition
Kader Attia, Fokus grupa, Adelita Husni-Bey, Hana Miletić
07-24.05.2024
VN Gallery, Ilica 163-a, Zagreb
Organized and produced by: WHW

This exhibition delves into the notions of care and repair, emphasizing their crucial role in today’s world, especially within the framework of decolonial and collective practices. The participating artists focus on the themes of labor, decolonization, and repair by creating new imaginaries. The exhibition reimagines these notions through dialogue, exploring how artistic engagement can contribute to dismantling the unjust structures of neoliberal racial patriarchy.

The exhibition takes its title from a work by Adelita Husni-Bey, On Necessary Work (2021), which was developed in collaboration with unionized nurses from the United States and Denmark in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Adelita Husni-Bey is an Italian-Libyan artist and pedagogue interested in anarcho-collectivism, political theater and legal anthropology. Since 2012, she has organized workshops and produced video installations through non-competitive pedagogical models, within and outside the field of contemporary art. On Necessary Work follows a small group of unionized nurses participating in an online workshop to discuss the social construct of ‘necessary work.’ The group read and studied the language used in protocols that insist on the necessity of work during the pandemic by assigning ‘critical’ status to certain infrastructural and industrial sectors, brutally safeguarding capitalist production in crisis. During the workshop, the nurses were asked to reflect on how their respective healthcare systems and unions responded to the crisis and record their own mobile phone footage following a set of exercises as material that was screened and discussed during the workshops. The resulting footage was shot by the nurses and recorded during the online workshop on Zoom.

With a background in documentary photography, and inspired by her family’s long tradition of handiwork, Hana Miletić has developed an artistic practice based primarily on the creation of handwoven textile works. She uses the weaving process to reflect on the social and cultural realities in which she lives and works. Weaving, which requires practice, time, care and attention, allows her to formulate new relationships between work, thought and the emotional sphere, as well as to counteract certain economic and social conditions at play, such as acceleration, standardization and transparency. Through her use of weaving, Hana reproduces the public gestures of maintenance and repair, showing buildings, infrastructures and objects in mutation or in various states of transition. The exhibition includes works from a series of handcrafted textile objects titled Materials (2022), created for the artist’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka. Materials explores and maps the remnants of the textile producers and production sites in Rijeka, many of which have been rendered extinct by neoliberal market conditions.

Kader Attia is a multidisciplinary artist who draws upon the lived experiences of two disparate cultural identities: Algerian and French. From this place of cultural intermediacy, Attia’s practice interrogates sociopolitical complexities rooted in the histories of colonialism and cultural obfuscation. In his practice, Attia employs poetic installations and sculptural assemblages to investigate the far-reaching emotional implications of Western cultural hegemony and colonial systems of power for non-Western subjectivities, focusing particularly on collective trauma and notions of repair. The film The Object’s Interlacing (2020) included in the exhibition initiates a dialogue with different practitioners on the subject of restitution of African cultural artefacts that were violently displaced into Western ownership during the era of historical colonialisms.

The artistic collective Fokus grupa has been active since 2012. In their work, they aim to establish a critical framework for interpreting the artistic, economic, and political environment. Fokus grupa borrows and learns from design, architecture, curatorial practice, and writing, and often involves collaborators from other fields. Vedutas from the Palace of the Privileged Company of Trieste and Rijeka (2018-2024) is an ongoing artistic research project that explores the historical involvement of the city of Rijeka in the global economy, which was fueled by slave labor. Located in the oldest Austro-Hungarian sugar refinery, established in the mid-18th century in Rijeka, a series of “idealized” landscapes painted by unknown painters feature depictions of slaves.

Known as the Vedute Ideate, these paintings offer a rare portrayal of racialized slave labor within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It highlights the invisible labor that facilitated the industrial production of sugar, and reveals the relationship between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the peripheral port city of Rijeka in the global flow of capital and the history of colonialism. The project was initially developed for the 2nd Labin Industrial Biennale in 2018, curated by the WHW collective. The current installation in the exhibition, accompanied by a round-table discussion, represents the fourth iteration of the project. It aims to unravel the intertwined colonial history of the region. In this latest iteration Museum cuts (2024), Fokus grupa examines the representation of colonial history through the lens of the new display at the Rijeka City Museum. The roundtable explores the links between colonialism and the prosperity of Rijeka, i.e. their fragmentary interpretations. It will serve as a basis for a broader problematization of contemporary exhibition practices, and as an incentive for a discussion about the importance of decolonial readings of museum collections and established historical-artistic narratives from this region, as well as the importance of the demands for a rearticulation of interpretive models.

CURATORS: Ana Dević & Ana Kovačić

ARTISTS: Kader Attia, Fokus grupa, Adelita Husni-Bey, Hana Miletić

ROUNDTABLE: Towards Decolonial Perspectives with Fokus grupa, Sanja Horvatinčić, Ph.D., Josipa Lulić, Ph.D., Ema Makarun, Lujo Parežanin moderated by: Petra Šarin. 07/05/2024 at 18.00h. VN Gallery, Ilica 163-a, Zagreb

Organized and produced by: WHW

Exhibition design: Marijana Gradečak

Technical support and set up: Marin Kovačević, Vedran Grladinović

The exhibition is realized in conjunction with the collaborative project Care ecologies, organized between WHW, G&A Mamidakis Foundation, State of Concept Athens and Idensitat.

Thanks to: VN Gallery, Olga Majcen Linn, Vujičić Collection, City Museum of Rijeka

The conversation is part of the discursive program History of Art and Society: Conversations on Degrowth, while the screenings by Kader Attia and Adelita Husni-Bey are part of the film and video program Ecologies of Care: New Alliances.

The program is supported by:
City Office for Culture and Civil Society
Croatian Audiovisual Centre (HAVC)
European Commission’s Creative Europe program
Kultura Nova Foundation
Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia