WORK / LIVE 干活 Exhibition at TCC Take Care Contemporary, Beijing

TCC (Take Care Contemporary), a newly opened artistic and social research space in Beijing, run by professors from CAFA, has invited the SSR&D Department to display a documentation of its 15 years long practice.

 

TCC press release introduces the exhibition with a note:

 

What happens when art abandons the "safe distance" of critique and embeds itself directly into the nerve endings of the capitalist production system, specifically, within a foreign-owned factory in Beijing? This exhibition documents a fifteen-year-long experiment: an artist enters a corporate environment as a formal employee, sharing "non-productive" time with the workers.

Then he gradually invite other artists to interact constantly with the workers, managers and employees. This represents a redistribution of the sensible order; subjects who have been "hailed" (interpellated) as mere "laborers" gradually reclaim the right to speak, to see, and to create through aimless, shared companionship. Here, the mechanism of "hailing" is subtly subverted: the factory floor is not merely populated by the productive subjects summoned by capital; it also contains fissures quietly opened up by artistic practice. This is a form of genuine friction, far more than a mere utopia. The exhibition witnesses how a "social sensibility", one that defies co-optation, manages to persist, with remarkable tenacity, in a world governed by the primacy of efficiency.