(non)work

On one hand, treating artistic practice as work is emancipatory as it allows us to take care of our energy, demand decent working conditions and support. On the other hand, in existing precarity, it leads to the situation where we are turned into self-managers, striving for self-sustainability, when everything we do is a work, we are 100% responsible for it. So maybe we should instead demand to be lazy, unproductive, and uncreative, without being stressed and guilty? We suggest to explore the notions of artistic work and non-work.

We want to challenge the traditional values around the ‘work-line’, to question colonisation by economic demands, imagine a less work-centered future and raise new sensibilities for idleness, unproductivity and alternative pleasures. The group (non)work focuses on cultural conditions of (non)work, emotional labor, critique of self-management and self-sustainability, political meanings of laziness and refusal to work, among other issues.

Contributors:

Nils Claesson, Olia Sosnovskaya, Nicolay Spesivtsev, Dzina Zhuk

Dzina Zhuk

Dzina Zhuk is an artist and tech-politics researcher based in Moscow, Russia. She is part of the group eeefff  and Flying Cooperation. She co-organizes the annual event WORK HARD! PLAY HARD! in Minsk. Her alter-ego bitchcoin works with voice, audio, future beats and sci-fi synth.

Her major interests include jeopardized interfaces; emotional effects of algorithms; non-anthropocentric view towards machine intelligence; and imaginary scenarios of the present day.

Olia Sosnovskaya

Olia Sosnovskaya is an artist, researcher, and writer, based in Vienna, Austria. She holds a BA and MA in Visual and Cultural Studies from the European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania) and joint Erasmus Mundus MA in Dance Practice, Knowledge and Heritage. She is currently a PhD candidate in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She works with text and performative and visual practices. Her research interest also include the problematics of festivity, collectivity and affect; body, dance, gender and decolonial studies; contemporary modes of work and leisure and their intersection.

She is a member of the artistic-research group Problem Collective and the WORK HARD! PLAY HARD! working group. She took part in various performance and media festivals and group exhibitions in Belarus, Ukraine, Sweden, Germany, Bulgaria, Finland, and others.