Precarious: Carole Condé + Karl Beveridge
Spanning work from 1980 to 2011, the Precarious exhibition borrows its title from a series that Condé and Beveridge developed in collaboration with part-time college support staff. We catch a glimpse of the participatory workshop that formed the basis of Precarious (2010) in Roz Owen and Jim Miller’s documentary, Portrait of Resistance: The Art & Activism of Carole Condé & Karl Beveridge, screened in conjunction with this exhibition.
The site of the workshop is an office of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, consistent with the artists’ longstanding practice of collaborating with unions. In the film, Condé and Beveridge are staging possible image-concepts with a group of academic support workers, all of whom are women, reflecting the gendered division of labour that is a theme across Condé and Beveridge’s work. The workshop is at times emotionally charged, one participant fighting tears as she recounts her defiance on the day she was told of her dismissal.
After comforting her colleague, another workshop participant, Natasha Judhan, shares with the group what she will perform in the scene: “For myself, I’ll represent this aspect of, you’re loving your job, you want to keep doing your job, but the hours are not there, and the shifting schedule for part-timers—nothing’s set in stone, so your schedule fluctuates all the time. To plan your life around that, it’s quite hard.”
Judhan’s words, voiced in a workshop process that is often a constitutive moment of inquiry in Condé and Beveridge’s collaborative practice of staged photography, capture some of the essential qualities of the everyday experience of precarious employment, ranging from perpetual uncertainty to insufficient income to—for this education worker—a tension between the appeal of a rewarding job and the necessity of a sustainable livelihood. Clearly, what activists taught us to recognize as “precarity” is not a narrow jobs issue. To again borrow a word from Judhan, precarity’s stage is “life.”
What the multiple series in the Precarious exhibition—as well as the spaces in between the series—do give an account of, however, is the heterogeneity of precaritization, its uneven and differential unfolding across social locations of age, class, gender, race, and status—with the implication that the politics of precarity are hardly an isolated labour issue. Likewise, the exhibition illuminates the intersection of labour and other sites of precariousness, namely ecology, so fundamentally materially transformed by the mobilization of labour in the service of accumulation.
Precarity is not tantamount to weakness. The images selected for this exhibition are punctuated by the persistent efforts of working people to challenge the political economy of dispossession. These efforts are shared by Condé and Beveridge, whose ways of working point to alternative forms of communication, cooperation, and solidarity. The caring labour that is a motif in Condé and Beveridge’s photography is mirrored in their collaborative practice, which is suggestive of a more fully social mode of aesthetic production. Here, alliance formation, co-research, reciprocal learning, and collective organization contribute to the sort of social bonds necessary for creating new infrastructures of care within, against, and beyond precarity.
Image credit: Chris Lee
