The honor of work

The subject for the evening is the honor of work, in Swedish Arbetets ära. The title is taken from a monument over the working class in Malmö created by artist Axel Ebbe in 1929. The sculpture group is placed on Möllevångstorget, Malmö and depicts naked bodies carrying a rock in their bare arms. The industrial skyline of Malmö is also depicted on the massive stone. The whole society rests on the shoulders of the working class. That is the honor of work and the workers. But how does this honor look today? In a near future where machines are doing work, together with artificial intelligence, what will happen with the work and the honor? Are we left with the degradation of manual work, where the dirty jobs are managed by underpaid labor living under poor conditions, and on the other hand the magical artistic work? Will machines and artificial intelligence also dream and feel honor and pride? And why must people who have a job work themselves to the point of death? Do we have a Swedish form of the Japanese phenomenon Karōshi (Japanese= death by overwork) or a local variant of the Soviet Stakhanovism? A Lutheran Stakhanovism?

Guest: artist and writer Dmitri Plax
Curator: Nils Claesson

WORKAWORK is a multidisciplinary artistic research project supported by Vetenskapsrådet (the Swedish research Council) and managed by The Royal Institute of Art.