Curatorial introduction

Whereas previous industrial societies were based on the direct relationship between capital and labour, the current social-economic agenda –– of what is sometimes referred to as the 4th industrial revolution –– is concerned with networking and surplus value. Prosperity can be generated with a smaller labour force. This shift has brought additional risks for the working class: in earlier industrial societies the danger of exploitation was largely opposed and overcome by unionizing. In a more individualistic network society, one has to continuously show and prove to be part of the game, with the lurking side effect of becoming redundant. Life and work increasingly coincide. In other words still, in our current time-pressured culture of high performance the human body is increasingly observed and treated as a chargeable device, a battery of sorts. We strive to punch the clock and defy the pressure to perform by indexing our body and energy on schemes of wellbeing, in which balanced diets and bodily exercise––against the backdrop of the current aestheticization of health––become lifestyle attributes in an ongoing perceptual arms race. Instead of thinking in terms of collectivity, we self-discipline our bodies to constantly seek our inscription into labour schemes that acknowledge our being and valorize our energy input. We adhere to the imperatives to perform driven by the risk and anxiety to drop out and no longer matter.

In Laura Kuusk’s artistic practice one may observe a keen attentiveness to this current societal human condition. Her work is concerned with the conditioning principles, the levels of conformity and the societal normative ethics that are both self-imposed and imparted on our bodies, our behaviors and actions, and the ways in which self-actualization and identity-formation are increasingly subjected to notions of a one-dimensional consumerist quantifiable self. In that, her work is aimed at taking a qualitative leap, away from the oppressive ties that cognitive capitalism maintains with neoliberal society, towards a radical aspiration for bodily freedom and exploring the idea of desire as plentitude, rather than treating our desires as an insatiable lack, part of a slow burnout culture. She aims to exemplify the ways in which leisure time is increasingly indexed on schemes of productivity, and instead proposes different postures, attitudes and strategies breaking away from the one-directional leisure-work dynamic.
In so doing her queries start with reading domestic environment, or, more specifically, interrogating domestic underpinnings projected onto (semi-)public spaces. Among them are libraries, cinemas, museums, gyms, stores and warehouses, and predominantly office and working spaces, where the enhancement of human well-being increasingly filters from private into shared and (semi)public spaces by incorporating an experience of domesticity. The domestic environment––and the living room in particular––is a charged ground even without us ever really noticing. Marked as a seemingly private space to which we can fall back in order to retreat and recharge, the living room, and by extension our shared living-rooms-slash-office-spaces, have arguably become a contemporary invocation of the Foucauldian notion of biopower, which we could summarize as “the management of all that lives.” Similar to how we are made to believe that we can confirm our identity, our uniqueness and authenticity by consuming and purchasing fashionable and novelty items that are essentially a quantitative proliferation of multiples of one and the same thing, the (shared) domestic environment is indexed on similar grounds. It tends to function as a space for personalization, whereas it simultaneously exercises body control through wallpapers, screened realities, fixtures and utilitarian objects we bring in. If sitting during your workday has become the new smoking, how are we supposed to consider enhancing our wellbeing in the living room? If we speak about the possible prospect of having children, for what bewildering reason do we afterwards see advertisements for baby care products popping up in our Facebook newsfeed? Inside and outside, private and public worlds coalesce; there is no such thing as “online” and “in real life”. The feedback loop comes full circle, to the extent that even walking as the ultimate domain of freedom is indexed on the vectors of advanced capitalism through seemingly personalized sports gear advertisements: and instead we buy a set of new “limited” edition sneakers, a Segway or a hover board.
For Laura Kuusk it is of lesser interest to confront and potentially overcome this state of bodily reductionism by illustrating the increased aestheticization of health and how our stable patterns of behavior inform a market-driven proliferation of acquirable lifestyle attributes. Also, her work does not intend to propose a radical breakthrough in the system in which we are readily and fully immersed through a kind of “us-versus-them, we-versus-the system” dialectic. Instead, her work is engaged with counteracting the influence of advanced capitalism by mimicking and subverting its logic by introducing different templates of copy-paste culture. In so doing, the exhibition Dear Algorithm, will be staged as a choreography of everyday movements: the window display becomes a shop front for hybrid-organic clothing sculptures, the gallery attendant simultaneously serves as perception manager, a library section will give further instructions on subverting social expectations, conditioning principles and behavioral patterns, a video installation presents three nonhuman actors that aim to grapple with and relate to human working environments, and lastly one may encounter some other-than-human entities that are in no one’s pockets.

Ultimately the exhibition is aimed at facilitating a discussion around the body immersed in radically immanent relations, to show that the entire body thinks, and to re-envision a more grounded perspective concerned with mutual affect and care. By practicing the feminist theory of the politics of location, Kuusk aims to generate wariness and consciousness of our position in the scheme of things: interdependent with the other modes of being that enable our bodily subsistence overtime, away from the anthropocentric feedback loops that keeps positioning the human at the centre of it all. We are in this together.