Works in Shifts: Frontroom

by ABEER GUPTA, MOMENTOGRAPHY OF A FAILURE
curated by EVA BUSCH, MADHUSREE DUTTA

As part of the exhibition Ghosts, Traces, Echoes: Works in Shifts, three research-based artistic projects will be displayed in the Academyspace, the exhibition space of the Akademie der Künste der Welt, in three parts and over a period of five months. The exhibition will thus become a dynamic collection of different layers and histories, similar to a palimpsest. When the next layer is added, the previous one will not disappear completely – new narratives will be added to it. In this way, different time periods and geographical contexts will overlap.

A permanent installation in the entrance area serves as a thematic introduction and as a bridge between the past and the present. It consists of two artistic examinations of contemporary phenomena in working environments during the corona lockdown of spring 2020. In Walking Away, Abeer Gupta works with photographic material from social media, showing Indian itinerant workers fleeing the metropolises and at the same time fleeing the system, the fiction of infrastructure and the symbols of a nation. Momentography of a failure, a collaborative photography and research project, looks at gig economy workers in the transport and delivery sectors on the streets of Cologne. The product of a workshop involving photographers, urban researchers, activists from the group Liefern am Limit, authors and delivery workers, it illustrates the ongoing transition from an industrial to a digital platform economy. This change of course has given rise to unprecedented controversies and new forms of precarity, both for workers on temporary contracts and for dynamics in the cities. Both projects deal with mobility and vulnerability, urban spaces and urban infrastructure, and the visibility and fluidity of images.