Exhibition: 5 March – 18 April 2020
Opening: 5 March 2020, 6-8pm
Adrian Heathfield in conversation with Rebecca Hilton, Professor in Choreography: 12 March 2020, 6pm
Marabouparken konsthall, Löfströmsvägen 8, 172 66 Sundbyberg
What kind of labour is it, to work communally with the bodies, movements, expressions and affects of others, to dedicate one’s lifework to the othering that issues from these relations? Is a life – especially a life spent making, learning, giving and transforming oneself with others – a kind of infrastructure? How might we better understand and value the social and artistic force of such practices?
These questions are at the core of Spirit Labour. The film follows the artist Janine Antoni as she encounters some exemplary artistic figures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: choreographer and dancer Anna Halprin, and writer and philosopher Hélène Cixous. Spirit Labour traces a genealogy of artists engaging with the elements and non-human forces. Articulating the artists’ work as a form of what Heathfield calls ‘spirit labour’, the film acts as a powerful counter to notions of art as subservient to the spirit of capital.