Images at Work

This film and video program is conceived as an offshoot of and appendix to _Performing Conditions_—dependent on the whole, even as it supports it. Comprising nonfiction and experimental works made over the last half-century, the program sketches an unruly history of labor and its refusal. It also contends with recurrent debates around the image’s use-value—particularly the social documentary and militant cinema traditions that haunt the representation of labor. Across these works, “the worker” and the “working class” are not unified or historically stable entities. Instead, they flicker in and out of view, evincing their contested and elusive nature. Each thematic program screens for three weeks in the Bakalar Gallery. “Strike and Sabotage” proposes a shared grammar and common ground for labor struggle and anticolonial struggle. “With and Against Housework” presents visions of domestic work from diversely located feminist filmmakers in the 1970s and eighties. “Solidarity and Form” gathers oblique, abstract approaches to the representationally overdetermined subject of the worker. Finally, “Non/performance for the Camera” examines the figure of the cultural worker and their possibilities of refusal. _Images at Work_ is organized by Ramona Ngin, Curatorial Assistant.