Artists

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Press release

From the factory floor and the office cubicle to the studio, the domestic interior and the street, Model Worker looks at the ways in which labour is apportioned, socialised and subjectively lived across bodies, places and technologies. No longer contained within the discrete site of the workplace, labour saturates the entire field of social reproduction: the production and circulation of knowledge, the administration of domestic life, the extraction of mental and natural resources and the affective, largely unremunerated work of care. In the post-Fordist condition, the promises of efficiency and automation coexist with generalised precarity, while the valorisation of labour remains structurally asymmetrical, overdetermined by gender, class and the material relations under which work is performed. Whether physical or emotional, tangible or immaterial, waged or unwaged, individual or collective, labour disperses and becomes ever more diffuse. It may function as a source of income, identity and status, or as an agent of exhaustion and depletion, persistently overflowing the temporal and spatial boundaries of the working day and workplace - until the distinction between labour and life itself becomes increasingly untenable. The exhibition brings together the work of five artists who approach these conditions from distinctive perspectives. Madeleine Andersson examines the rationalisation and banality of contemporary labour, where objects and rituals of office work become both absurd and strangely familiar; Maryam Jafri turns the lens to the global supply chains and hidden labour underpinning supposedly immaterial economies; Cecilie Norgaard points towards the time, conditions and structures surrounding artistic work; Stacey de Voe explores the histories of textile production, tracing their entanglements with industrial memory, feminised labour and consumer culture; Sofie Winther reflects on reproductive labour and motherhood, and the links between affective and economic systems. Maryam Jafri's Clipboard and I’m Not Working are works excerpted from No Lithium No Work (2023), an installation exploring how lithium is one of the most common treatments for bipolar disorder and how it is also the main component in rechargeable batteries, underpinning everything from electric cars to smartphones to solar panels. In referring to lithium’s dual function and characteristics, Jafri's work weaves together mental health, labor rights and consumer culture, cutting across disparate geographies and social groups. From factory workers assembling lithium-powered smartphones and laptops jumping to their deaths rather than work another day for Apple or Dell to burnout and suicides by members of the creative class. In Jafri’s I’m Not Working (2023) keycaps placed in a pill organizer spell the phrase "I'm Not Working”, overlaid with the text from the organizer itself displaying the day of the week and the time (morn, noon, eve, bed). The phrase can refer to both wellbeing and/or labor. The mechanisms by which lithium carbonate powers rechargeable batteries are understood but the exact way it affects the brain as a mood stabilizer remains unknown. Moreover, dozens of studies reveal that populations exposed to naturally elevated levels of lithium carbonate in drinking water exhibit lower rates of suicide. Clipboard (2023) juxtaposes a Pharma-branded pen with the logo of the medication Eskalith (a lithium-based mood stabilizer) with a pdf printout of a scientific research article titled "Geospatial examination of lithium in drinking water and suicide mortality”. Through a material-based practice, Stacey de Voe activates the archive to investigate parallels between the production of desire and the history of consumption in relation to textile history, collective memory, feminized labor and friendship. Not bound to a specific medium, she utilizes installation, moving image, performance, printmaking and publication, often juxtaposing artisanal with mass-produced objects and archival material. Through several projects and exhibitions she has scrutinized the inherent effects that the once-blooming, now bygone textile industry has had on welfare politics, along with its close yet silent ties to the colonial system through the buying and trading of raw materials and finished goods. Her relationship with the histories of thread is prompted by her own experiences working within the garment industries of New York and Paris, as well as her matriarchal lineage of immigrant furriers and hosiery sellers. In metal treadle pedal (2026), de Voe turns to the production and circulation of nylon thread, and its implications on femininity, labour and representation. After being introduced to the public in the late 1930s as an attempt to sanction the success of the Japanese silk market, the production of nylon stockings was soon halted by the US government to facilitate the manufacturing of combat gear. Authorities launched official nationwide collection programs, encouraging women to donate their used nylon hosiery; the elastic, synthetic polymers were then melted down and re-spun into thread for military equipment, particularly parachutes. A photographic montage is screen-printed on leg-shaped metal plates, a silhouette that echoes the heated machinery once used to form a one-size-fits-all product. By layering archival images of female workers and their hands, alongside photographs of machines, strikes and department store displays, de Voe allows divergent historical residues to connect and disconnect, opening up new relations and meanings, while mapping the history of a material and its connections to social and infrastructural conditions, from industrial memory to consumer culture and labour politics. Where oil painting has historically been associated with wealth and social status, Cecilie Norgaard shifts the focus towards the overlooked, mundane objects that surround us. In her paintings, elements of working- and middle-class life are transformed into painterly subjects. Tools, vehicles, office cubicles, globes and piggy banks are displaced from their familiar contexts and reconstituted as aesthetic objects within painting, where their social and economic associations remain present while taking on new symbolic configurations. Repeated, multiplied and made to collide, these familiar motifs acquire pictorial significance while also pointing back to the material and socio-economic reality underlying the conditions of artistic production and the status of painting as a medium. In Public Art (2025), the crayon undergoes a similar transformation. Coloured crayons become workers in disguise: jobless artist-workers gathering at an opening around a painting. Among them, a yellow crayon enjoys a smoke, the purple crayons hold drinks, while the remaining palette is busy mingling and socialising. The scene creates a reflexive loop between an ordinary tool of artistic production and the social rituals through which value is produced and recognised. The crayons are at once the labour force of the painting and participants in the social economy that surrounds it. Through this shift in status, Norgaard humorously brings questions of class and hierarchy into the space of painting: whose labour is made visible, whose objects are deemed aesthetic, and whose work remains in the background. Madeleine Andersson is a research-based artist whose practice proposes alternative historisations and speculative structures to expose and disrupt the psycho-social dimensions of knowledge production. Her multidisciplinary work across video, sculpture and performance brings together academic discourse, scientific and pseudo-scientific narratives, social media, popular culture and horror movies in playful installations. By combining seemingly rational structures with absurd and often humorous disruptions, Andersson exposes the strange assumptions and failures that underpin systems designed to organise human thought and behaviour. Her interest in the psycho-social dimensions of knowledge production - and the forms of discipline, self-experimentation and control that accompany it - thus offers another perspective on the conditions surrounding contemporary labour. In Ding-Dong-Daddy (stuffed with paper) (2026), two black leather attaché cases are held by manicured silicone hands, their bodies absent. Paper crammed into the cases as though the contents of the office are trying to escape their container. What is ostensibly contained within the workplace attempts to leak into the surrounding space. As the demands of work migrate into the spaces and rhythms of everyday life, the overflowing paperwork becomes a material image of labour exceeding the structures and boundaries designed to contain it. In a peculiar inversion of the commodity form, the worker no longer disappears behind the object of production, but seems instead to be displaced by the pervasive routines that organise labour itself. The familiar signs of professional life are reduced to their most recognisable elements - the briefcase, the hand, the paperwork - while the individual who would ordinarily animate them and give them coherence has disappeared. Working across sculpture, performance and video, Sofie Winther examines forms of interdependence through which bodies become entangled with one another and with institutions. Her practice centres on motherhood, birth as labour and the ambivalent relationship between affective and economic systems. Winther often engages with the material environment of childhood, exploring the everyday objects through which care is practised and early learning takes shape. Composed of foam mats bearing letters, numbers and shapes, Plug and Play (2026) evokes the everyday processes through which children learn to engage with their surroundings. These early encounters with learning are also encounters with the social norms that organise collective life. Play and education thus emerge not as neutral domains, but as sites where behaviours and discipline are internalised and the individual begins to be shaped as a social subject, formed in relation to codes that precede them and extend beyond their immediate experience. Considered in relation to the labour of child-rearing, Plug and Play also speaks to social reproduction: how conditions of social life are renewed across generations. The largely invisible work of care is integral to these processes, encompassing both the material and affective work of sustaining someone else’s life and the everyday practices through which children shape their relationship to the world. The work thus brings the intimate labour of care into relation with the wider social structures reproduced through it, complicating the apparent neutrality of the objects and environments through which childhood unfolds. Maryam Jafri lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work has been widely exhibited, including in solo exhibitions at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (US); Blaffer Museum of Art, Houston (US); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (NL); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (CH); Bétonsalon, Paris (FR); Gasworks, London (UK); Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus (DK); Museet for Samtidskunst, Roskilde (DK); Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö (SE); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (AU); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (CA) and elsewhere. Recent biennials include Front International (Cleveland Triennial), São Paulo Biennial, Venice Biennale (Belgian Pavilion), Manifesta 9, and the biennials of Shanghai, Taipei, Bucharest, Thessaloniki, and Québec City, among others. Cecilie Norgaard (b. 1991, DK) is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2021) and lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Overgaden, Copenhagen (2025); Simian, Copenhagen (2025); High Art, Paris (2025); Rinde am Rhein, Düsseldorf (2024); Shahin Zarinbal, Berlin (2024); Matteo Cantarella, Copenhagen (2024); galeriepcp, Paris (2023); Den Frie, Copenhagen (2022); and mumok, Vienna (2022) among others. Stacey de Voe (b. 1988, US) lives and works in Malmö, Sweden. Her work has been exhibited and performed at SYSTEMA, Marseille (2026); Au Passage, Paris (2026); Moderna Museet (2026); Simian, Copenhagen (2025); Skēnē – Space for Contemporary Art, Malmö (2025); LCCA/Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga (2025); Skånes Konstförening, Malmö (2024); Oslo Kunstforening, Oslo (2024), amongst others. Sofie Winther (b. 1991, DK) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. She graduated with an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and holds a BFA from Gerrit Rietveld Academie (NL). Her work has been exhibited at Inside-Out Museum (Beijing, CN), Nikolaj Kunsthal (Copenhagen, DK), Sophienholm Kunsthal (DK), Gammelgaard (DK), EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art (FI), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (DK), inter.pblc (DK) and Den Frie Udstillingsbygning (DK), among others. Madeleine Andersson (b. 1993, SE) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Andersson’s recent exhibitions include Muzej suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb (2026); Kunsthall Trondheim (2025); Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm (2025); and O–Overgaden, Copenhagen (2024), among others.