Deborah Rundle

Changing the Subject

Img 2483 Install Dusk
Spectre, repurposed Oregon pine roofing battens, fluorescent lights, vinyl cut text; Slowdown, neon sign, transformer, electric cables.

Fired for insubordination from my first paid job, I came to an early appreciation of the play of power in the workplace. The understandings seeded in this experience developed into an interest in subjectivity within late capitalism and how the mythologies of neoliberalism play out in the field of labour. Intersecting the visual with the written and aural, this project uses materialised language within a multi-disciplinary practice that muses on possibilities for change. It refuses to draw utopianism to a close, sensing unrealised potential lying within everyday working life and suggests a political imagination beyond the notion that ‘there is no alternative’.

Forming a conceptual troika, the artworks call up unfulfilled futures relegated to the past in order to engage in a critique of the present. Spectre yokes an echo of Vladimir Tatlin’s never realised tower, together with the words of Pussy Riot member, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. It suggests that the dashed utopian ideals of early socialism might be brought into contemporary contemplation through the voice of a present-day Marxist feminist. Chorus plays a recording of the artist singing an old anti-work song through a warehouse internal address speaker. And Slowdown illuminates the word COPING in pink neon, perhaps posing the question,
“Are we?”.

Spectre Detail Img 2511
Spectre (detail). The words illuminated by the fluorescent tubes are extracts from the letters of Nadya Tolokonnikova (member of Pussy Riot) to Slavoy Žižek written whilst she was imprisoned for actions taken with other members of Pussy Riot inside the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in 2012.
Slowdown 43 A5060
Slowdown, Slowdown illuminates the word COPING in pink neon (the title plays with the dual meaning of slowdown as both a form of industrial action and a slowing of economic growth).

Chorus — in which I sing an old folk song titled On Mondays. Played through a repurposed warehouse internal address speaker–intended for announcements from management–the work oscillates between a protest song, a musing on indolence and a playful reflection on the concept of a post-work society. 

Chorus, warehouse mono speaker, with looped audio of Deborah Rundle singing “On Mondays”, a song from the 1950s, author unknown.

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