Simon Denny; Amazon worker cage patent drawing as virtual King Island Brown Thornbill cage (US 9,280,157 B2: “System for transporting personnel within an active workspace”, 2016); 2019. Courtesy of Kunstsammlung Basel.
It’s one thing to know about a problem. You can read all of the statistics and developments as they emerge online, see images of horrible conditions and have a news anchor break down the political stepsthat made something possible, but there is a different level of understanding that comes from engaging with a subject. This was curator Soeren Grammel’s motivation when putting together the exhibition Circular Flow: On the Economy of Inequality at the Kunstsammlung in Basel, which presents intentionally and unintentionally political artworks dealing with subjects ranging from the 16th century spice trade to the dystopian proposals of present-day conglomerates.
“Journalism aims more at conveying information, mostly in a one-way direction,” Grammel,tells SLEEK. “Art, on the other hand, is based on communication with the viewers. The installations and videos have a much more open form into which the viewers can contribute their thoughts and perspectives. Their perspective becomes part of the whole process.”
Ulrike Grossarth; 16 moving things; Dresden, 2005. Courtesy of Kunstsammlung Basel.
This becomes evident in works such as Simon Denny’s Amazon Worker Cage (2019) series. Here, the New Zealand-born artist explores the patents filed by Amazon for the construction of a cage, which would potentially serve as a workstation for warehouse employees in an automated environment. The online marketplace is often criticised for inhumane working conditions within its warehouses—one report found that warehouse workers in the UK wear diapers, because they do not have time to use the restroom and are subject to gruelling physical shifts. Denny’s piece shows how the company would take things further: a life-size 3D printed cage puts the details of the unsettling equipment on a human scale, making features like the cage-opening keypad on the outside, rather than facing the employee, hard to miss.
Other works, like Swiss video artist Ursula Biemann’s Romonte Sensing (2001) demonstrate the artist’s years of work and study interviewing communities from Eastern Europe to East Asia to understand how women enter into sex trafficking and the reality of the routes they travel, mixing interviews with then-new NASA satellite imagery. This type of in-depth approach to a topic is seen less and less as news budgets dwindle and attention spans shrink. In this sense, the works on display require time and attention to understand fully. “Where in the current economy of journalism does such thorough research“ take place?” Grammel remarks. “I only know a few media [outlets] and those are usually not very widespread.”
From global food monopolies and farmers committing suicide in protest, to the rise in plastic use and its links to environmental problems, Circular Flow investigates a variety of concerning issues over multiple floors. According to Grammel, the intensity of the situations described by the works on display is part of what energises visitors to spend time with them “I have noticed that many people enthusiastically engage with the contents of the exhibition because it encourages them to critically examine reality and to ‘do’ something in relation to it,” he says. “People who get fatigued might only be those who prefer simple entertainment and distraction in their leisure time; like on private television or glossy magazines.”
Wang Bing; 15 Hours; 2017. Courtesy of Kunstsammlung Basel.
Still, there are some pieces, like Wang Bing’s 2017 single-shot documentary, 15 Hours, which exposes the reality of how fast fashion is made, that cannot be viewed in their entirety. The 15-hour film begins at the start of a shift at a clothing factory in China and ends when they clock out. While entry to the museum allows visitors to come back at the start of the next day, should they want to resume viewing, the goal of the piece is to show that this is not an appropriate duration of time to ask people to do anything. As with the rest of the works, it is a choice of what to engage with and how long or deeply to engage.
“The world is not “explained” here like in newspapers, but art provokes an active and or intellectual engagement with the reality surrounding us,” Grammel notes. “This is more important than simply consuming facts.”
Circular Flow: On the Economy of Inequality runs through to 3 May the Kunstsammlung in Basel.