Andrew Kachel

curator, writer

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AUGUST - OCTOBER 2018:

A new job to unwork at
PARTICIPANT INC
253 E Houston St #1
New York, NY 10002



Karin Schneider, Sabotage, 2017. CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco. Courtesy of Karin Schneider.

As an activity that is perhaps as widely shared as it is varied in character, what potentials are latent in work as a ground for reconsidering entrenched social, political, and economic relations? A new job to unwork at is a multidisciplinary project that studies the many social, material, and economic processes understood as “work,” and the ways in which this classification of human activity operates as a legitimating discourse that privileges certain subjects and life choices. The project is the continuation of ongoing research that examines the ideological consequences of work in shaping our identities and experiences of the world.

The latest materialization of this investigation takes the shape of a series of public programs (August) and an exhibition (September) at PARTICIPANT. In this iteration, we draw on the concept of unwork as a wry subversion of work, focusing on practices that re-imagine work ’s intended flows and ends, often short-circuiting the power relations inherent in labor relations, distilling their (often) destructive potentials into a politics of commoning and care.

Exhibition featuring: Goldman Club (Emanuel Almborg and Aliza Shvarts), Tehching Hsieh, Devin Kenny, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Wes Larios, Fred Lonidier, Dylan Mira, Karin Schneider, Kandis Williams of Cassandra Press.

Programs featuring: Amelia Bande (with susan karabush, Neyza Honore, Jenno Snyder, and Tina Zavitzanos), Coop Fund, JoAnn Elam, Rafa Esparza, Kevin Jerome Everson, Karl McCool, Lise Soskolne (W.A.G.E.), Kathi Weeks, Valerie Lynn Werder, and contributors to GLQ special issue The Queer Commons(co-edited by Gavin Butt and Nadja Millner-Larsen; featuring Zach Blas, Ashon Crawley, Christina Hanhardt, Evren Savic, Arlen Austin, Clit Club contributors [including Julie Tolentino]).