“The Question of Class: Art Labor and Class Erasure”

With contributions by Ali Hussein Al-Adawy, Sabian Baumann, Noa and Lara Castro Lema, Maurin Dietrich, Elisa Giardina Papa, Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei, Doreen Mende, Elke aus dem Moore, Amol K Patil, James Richards, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Latefa Wiersch, Angharad Williams, and Tirdad Zolghadr. Moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer. Research: Marion Ritzmann. 

On-site: Auditorium, HGK Basel FHNW, and livestream. The symposium is open to the public. Free admission. More information and program: dertank.ch. “The Question of Class: Art Labor and Class Erasure” is part of the symposium series “Gender and Equality in the Arts”.

The question of class—within the art world, as without—is not to be spoken aloud. Labor and precarity, abstracted and theorized and individualized, yes, but structural inequality, poverty, and the destruction of wage gains and the welfare state built by twentieth-century labor movements, no. This symposium at Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW considers the erasure of class in the contemporary art world and its markets, even as it remains the very material condition that runs through hierarchies of race, gender, and geography, in which capital, labor, and class are wildly, intrinsically entangled. The isolation of art workers into individual performers, the vilifying of migrant workers versus citizens, the structural fragmentation of freelance work, all make collective bargaining exigent. More questions, then: Who must work, and what is the effect of today’s technocratic accumulation of wealth? Is there a working-class aesthetics, in art as beyond it? What do we lose when the symbolic language of contemporary art becomes the language of the wealthy few? What are the real possibilities—for art, as for the world—of a new class consciousness? 

From symbolic wages and symbolic languages to material realities and artistic transformations, we will go. For our fall symposium, “The Question of Class: Art Labor and Class Erasure”, artists, theorists, filmmakers, curators, writers, and performers—workers all—will gather at Institute Art Gender Nature on November 12 and 13, 2026, to reflect on how class and labor have shaped their forms, their subjects, their ethics, their images, their imaginaries, their economies, their very possibilities, their work. Among the presentations, Ana Teixeira Pinto will consider work, and what happens to society when the wage relation ceases to constitute the basis for the social contract, and Ali Hussein Al-Adawy will discuss his ongoing film curatorial project Labor Images. Doreen Mende, meanwhile, will consider two films from the early eighties that proceed from a class consciousness of visual regimes of the Cold War: Chetna Vora’s OYOYO, and Harun Farocki's Before Your Eyes: Vietnam. All reflect on the entanglement of image and sound with politics and love, and the infrastructures that govern their circulation.

Filmmakers James Richards and Yarema Malashchuk will lead us through their own profound work with the moving image and its labors; Angharad Williams and Noa and Lara Castro Lema will offer reliably radiant performances that evoke the necessities and realities of the social contract; and talks and conversations by Sabian Baumann and Elke aus dem Moore, Elisa Giardina Papa, Amol K Patil, and Latefa Wiersch, will offer insight into the working conditions and class imaginaries of their brilliant, hard-won productions. Finally, curators Tirdad Zolghadr and Maurin Dietrich will reflect on individual exhibition projects strobed with class analysis. Zolghadr will discuss Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie, first curated with Nav Haq, in 2006, which interrogated how class structures shape the production, presentation, and reception of contemporary art. Zolghadr, along with Eszter Szakács, has now reprised the exhibition at de Appel, Amsterdam, where Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie 2026 is ongoing this autumn. Dietrich will look back on Not Working—Artistic Production and Matters of Class, a 2020 exhibition and film program at Kunstverein München that she curated, as well as on the history of the kunstverein itself, cultural forums invented for an emergent bourgeoisie and the formation of a “society of taste.”

In the years since their exhibitions were made, the situation of art and artists, as of society, has become ever more precarious, as late capitalism, genocidal violence, a renewed necropolitics of force, and an empowered billionaire class of tech oligarchs intent on the accumulation of land, resources, and capital have all converged to make living unbearable, work unworkable, and art a perilous pursuit. That said, every artwork is made on the ground and in the workshop of class relations. One can no more disentangle social class and artistic production, than they can form and content, theory and practice, images and language. Indeed, the discourse of contemporary art is strobed by the language of labor: We produce images, we make work, our practices are focused on the production of art. What are you working on? We ask, again and again. And yet, in the art world, as without, social class relations remain steeped in shame and silence. This symposium, the radiant and committed work and thinking of those producing it, will be devoted to addressing exactly this: our souls, our bodies, and our images at work. Join us.

Curated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer, “The Question of Class: Art Labor and Class Erasure”, is part of the biannual symposia series on issues of artistic practice and society that they have organized at Institute Art Gender Nature since 2018.

The symposium is dedicated to the memory of Dolores Huerta.

Press contact: Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW, Anna Francke, anna.francke@fhnw.ch