Worker Ant After Work
Matti Sumari

What a mess! The ears have crawled out of the gallery. Perhaps they could not bear to listen to the ever-echoing jargon of freelancers, artists, curators, and gallery visitors for one minute more. Inside the gallery, lighting oscillates like days between work and rest.

Identity has long been bound to occupation; we are defined by what we do. Today, perhaps especially within the contemporary arts field, freelancing might as well be synonymous to being permanently unemployed. We move from workplace to workplace and spend our leisure chasing billable hours.

In the exhibition Worker Ant After Work, we encounter depressed, freelancing and unemployed lampposts, standing with their posture broken, hunchbacked through day and night. A cocktail table resembles solar panels made of cabbage. When sliced open, the cabbage evokes x-ray images of brains.

Scattered throughout the exhibition space lie apple cores and hollowed cabbage heads, as if nonchalantly tossed over the shoulder, an everyday provocation. The bite marks on an apple are brutal and visceral, pulling the most classical and pure symbol into mundane reality.