The Shape of Labour
The LocHal in Tilburg, a former locomotive repair facility dating back to the 1930s, is now an architectural delight and a prize-winning cultural facility. The LocHal is the setting in which six international artists respond to the facility’s industrial past while exploring the performative expression of labor today.
In the past half-century, due to the global impact of free-market capitalism, western industries have outsourced their industrial production.to emerging and developing countries. As the modes of labor changed, the workforce adjusted and adopted the immaterial, subdued, and digitized labor that we know today.
Now the office has become the production line and old factories have become hosts for moments of leisure. Meanwhile, manual labor has become a widespread spectacle - 5-minute crafts, Blown Away, The Great Pottery Throw Down, and Master Chef, amongst many other reality shows, attend to the growing need to reconnect with the tangible forms of production that have been removed from everyday life.
As a response to this phenomenon, this group of Eindhoven-based artists, all alumni of The Design Academy Eindhoven (MA) explore the modes that permeate labor today through sculpture, performance, and video. Their work visualizes how a physical connection with material forms of production is an overlooked human need.
This exhibition shows the work of Bruno Baietto, Shun Chih Chang, Chongjin Chen, Meghan Clarke, Qiaochu Guo & Jing He.
The exhibition was selected in response to the Open Call that Kunstloc Brabant distributed among artists in Brabant at the end of 2021.
