An exhibition about labour exploitation and its health impacts might sound a bit “eat your greens”: important but unappealing. So it should be to the credit of the Wellcome Collection, and independent curator Cindy Sissokhko, that its latest offering actually goes down quite nicely. Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights pulls together a mix of artworks and artefacts, from the 18th century to the present day, that are by turns intellectually engaging, emotionally affecting, and even beautiful.
This is not a comprehensive overview of the topic. There is nothing on the rise of what David Graeber called “bulls--- jobs” (middle management, receptionists, corporate lawyers etc), for instance, when this is a phenomenon that causes plenty of harm. But then again, the show only gets one floor of the Wellcome’s exhibitions space. Perhaps wisely, it focuses instead on three specific terrains where undervalued work has taken place over a long period of time: the plantation, the street, and the home.
Within these categories, connections between different types of work and effects on health are made. In the first section, the forced labour of enslaved people on agricultural farms in colonies is linked not only to the dangerous working conditions on modern plantations (there’s a horrific set of photos showing the injuries of workers on a tea plantation in Bangladesh) but also prison labour. As one 1976 activist poster on display puts it: “Jail is just a kind of warehouse for poor people.” One of the strangest and most troubling artefacts in the show is a 19th-century slide rule designed to calculate “treadwheel labour” – a painful form of punishment for prisoners that came with the side effect of generating energy for milling corn or pumping water.
Not everything is so depressing, though. The second section, on sanitation and sex workers, makes the case for the dignity of any work that’s undertaken consensually – and the power of resistance when conditions are unsafe or unfair. A highlight is Lindsey Mendick’s newly commissioned installation Money Makes The World Go Round, inspired by the historic occupations of churches in Lyon and London by sex workers protesting against police mistreatment in the 1970s and ’80s. A church-like structure is filled with an array of unapologetically brash ceramic money-boxes that allude to the oldest profession: my favourites were the pink piggy banks with police bobby hats.
The final section joins the dots between unpaid care and housework, most often done by mothers, and the experiences of migrant domestic workers. Material from the Wages for Housework campaign archive is interesting, though it pales in comparison to the serious exploitation and abuse recounted in Our Journey (2019), a harrowing video featuring the stories of women who were brought to the UK with non-transferable visas as “domestic workers in private households”. Thankfully, the exhibition ends on a more uplifting note, with a video and audio installation by the artist Moi Tran featuring members of an advocacy group called the Voice of Domestic Workers, clapping in rhythmic unison to the blues-y sounds of a cello and trombone – a moment of joyful respite from hard graft.
From 19 September 2024 until 27 April 2025. Tickets: https://wellcomecollection.org/
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