Galerie Arbeit

(former Dienst)
Research in practice, currently on stand-by
Exhibition series / Micro artist residency / Bar, 10/07 – 11/05/2022
Artists in residency: Thilda Craquelin & Zoé Ledoux, Cora Marin, Lowri Whiskerd
Sound artists: Julia Koch, Alexandra Tretter, Eliza Wagener
Graphic design: Wiebke Grieshop
Bar design: together with Paula Hoffmann

As artists, especially those from non-academic backgrounds without cultural, social, and financial capital, we operate in a hyper-competitive, elitist realm, as we gamble our way up and down the paternoster. What is this industry that produces extremely well educated professionals but keeps them in a constant state of existential fear? How can we be non-stop on duty with our backs pressed against the employment agency?

In Aki Kaurismäki’s film Drifting Clouds (1996), all the employees of a restaurant are fired without notice because its owner has failed to pay her debts. The colleagues lose touch with one another. After periods of anger, isolation, and hopelessness, they reunite and, funded by the ex-owner’s last few coins, open the restaurant “Ravintola työ” (Finnish for “Work”).

DIENST was a temporary low-budget institution that I directed. It combined a studio visible through the shop window with a bar scenario in the back room. The involved exclusively women artists I invited for micro-residencies showed their commissioned works during the exhibition series “Schatz ich kann nicht, ich bin im Dienst” (“Honey I can’t, I’m on duty”). All participants received a basic income for their stay. On weekdays Monday to Friday between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., the artists produced artworks. Exhibition openings were held every Friday night. The bar scenario in the back room, the symbolic place of precarious part-time jobs was directly integrated into the space of artistic production and at the same time established as a meeting place.

From here, I have been conceptualizing Galerie Arbeit. I aim to gather information around class related inequality in the arts, perspectives and concepts for income stability for artists, and develop with formats to invite children and teenagers from non-academic backgrounds to academic art.