5TH URAL INDUSTRIAL BIENNALE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Werker Collective’s project A Gestural History of the Young Worker is an attempt to reconstruct histories of the oppressed. Gestures are primary manifestations of bodies in social space, as they precede words in expressing desire, pain, excitement, relaxation and anxiety. Bodies whose capacity to speak is restricted by the environment in which they live, develop a vocabulary beyond the spoken word.
Images and documents for this project have been gathered collectively from the variety of visual sources such as propaganda and glossy magazines, museum and library archives, grassroots documentary photography, and paraphernalia found in flea markets. Presented together these pictures create an image of worker as a queer; radical emancipative straggle of workers refers to political practices of LGBTQ+. Highlighting these analogies, Werker Collective creates a utopian image of synthesis of work and desire.
The project is created with support from The Dutch Embassy in Moscow.
Werker Collective