Intro: My Practice

April 2025




























As an artist, I often feel more like a worker bound by production schedules, deadlines, and institutional frameworks. Just as artistic labour operates within a chained workforce system of economic transactions, sustaining an entire industry of ‘materials suppliers, assistants, fabricators, technicians, administrators, museum staffs, university workers, and the whole infrastructure of the artworld.’ (Artists and the Politics of Work, 2019) In this sense, artists function like self-automated machines, continuously producing to meet economic demands. While we are all given a ‘value’, artists are always looking for fundingand are constantly quantified, priced, and commodified, reinforcing the capitalist logic of labour as exchange. However, André Gorz argues that ‘to go beyond capitalism, we must, above all, end the supremacy of commodity relations – including the sale of labour – by prioritising voluntary exchange and activities which are ends in themselves’ (Gorz, 1985). This drives my artistic inquiry on whether artistic production exists outside the logic of capitalist productivity or is inherently assimilated into it. My work engages with this paradox by creating automated sculptural systems that appear to perform mechanical rituals—not as tools of efficiency, but as actors in an endless cycle of futile labour.

















































In my practice, I explore these ideas through kinetic installations that engage inmeaningless, repetitive actions—machines that wipe, polish, or clean without actually achieving anything. I challenge audience expectations about labour, automation, and productivity by presenting the illusion of efficiency without actual outcomes. These works enquire: Do automated systems truly make life easier, or do they entrap us in cycles of artificial necessity? The result is a critique of automation as a false promise of progress, one that mirrors the broader capitalist obsession with perpetual motion and output. Rather than presenting a dystopian or utopian vision, my work exposes the contradictions of contemporary automation—suggesting that nothing is ever truly achieved and that the cycle of productivity itself may be the ultimate illusion.













Me and My Selected Pieces



























MOUTHLESS, 2025

















ORBIT OF OBEDIENCE, 2024
Steven Shaviro asserts, ‘Everything in life must now be seen as a kind of labour: we are still working, even when we consume, and even when we are asleep.’ (Shaviro, 2013) This notion underpins my current sculptural practice, which explores automation, pseudo-productivity, and the illusion of efficiency in postcapitalist society. My work critiques how technological advancements, marketed as liberatory, often result in new forms of unseen, cyclical and ultimately fruitless labour rather than true emancipation from work.























Collective Infection and ALL & 1, 2024






















Automation is often perceived as a means of eliminating work, helping to attain goals and productivity, or even replacing labourers, making them workless. Much like the ‘capitalist utopian of the production process without labour’ (Edwards, 2001). While I believe we cannot rely too much on machines, many automated machines do not help or make us convenient and frequently require continuous human oversight. Technologies like self-check-out machines in cashiers and artificial intelligence-generated content often depend on human labour to function correctly. My sculptural works highlight this contradiction, questioning whether automation genuinely liberates us or simply reconfigures our role within an endless cycle of productivity.









Bibliography

Artists and the Politics of Work. (2019). In D. Beech, Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production (p. 45). london: Pluto Press.

Edwards, S. (2001). Factory and Fantasy in Andrew Ure. Journal of Design History, 17.

Gorz, A. (1985). Paths to Paradise. In On the Liberation from Work (p. 53). London: Pluto Press.

Shaviro, S. (2013, June). Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption. Retrieved from e-flux: https://www.eflux.com/journal/46/60070/accelerationist-aesthetics-necessary-inefficiency-in-times-of-real-subsumption/