Per aspera ad astra - Katarzyna Wyszkowska

Katarzyna Wyszkowska’s exhibition, featuring Szymon Sokołowski, does not only speak about work, but is a work as well. It collects work-related stories and anecdotes, circling around burn-out, depression and exploitation, the oppressive domain of house work, money-manifesting meditations, promotion up to the edge of one’s incompetence and the absurd atmosphere of positivity hovering over corporate office spaces – sites not so much of team work as mutual control. Ostensibly, it all boils down to finding ways of working less, improving working conditions and increasing efficiency. In any case, efficiency is harnessed by capitalism. Realistically, this very system transforms and commodifies its critiques and social anger, grinding every revolution and every protest into one pop-cultural pulp. We are prophesying the end of work, when even spare time amounts to consumption and constant craving: the incessant satisfaction and production of needs; we are forecasting the end of the working class, while big corporations open factories in the global South, new and invisible, as exempt from democratic control. We still believe in the American dream, in time-saving technology or even that the poor only have themselves to blame. After all, nothing ventured, nothing gained. By the way, an art collector acquaintance of mine thinks it is impossible for people in the United States to go hungry. There are McDonald’s everywhere! Labor vincit omnia. Yet another motto and another Latin dictum. In a 1902 film about conquest of space, a group of scientists lands on the Moon. There, they battle extraterrestrials and win the fight by means of rain umbrellas. They return to Earth empty-handed. Back home, they are welcomed by an exhilarated crowd, unveiling a monument to the astronomer. The wizard-like sculpture points a finger at the sky. An inscription beneath spells out: work conquers all.