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Exhibit at Hard Graft (Photo: X/@rorystephencodd) The Hard Graft exhibition explores the impact of work on people’s health in three spaces—the plantation, the street and the home. The exhibition space opens with the theme of “the plantation”. As colonies were established in the newly “discovered” lands, workers laboured, as slaves or indentured labour, in inhuman conditions with poor development, injuries, disease and premature death.
The plantation economy has left a legacy of polluted air and water, that disproportionately affect racialised people. The exhibition cleverly moves from the plantation to mass incarceration in the United States, the largest prison system in the world. Hard, grinding work and confinement have devastating consequences for prisoners’ health, as well as adding to the coffers of the private capitalist companies that run the prison system.
The section on the street focuses on sanitation workers in different countries—a vital job that exposes them to pollution and toxic materials. Meanwhile, the criminalisation and stigma of sex workers often denies them access to healthcare and exposes them to violence. In the third section, the intimate space of the home is examined as a place where many women scratch a living as live-in maids, nannies or cleaners.
Hard Graft “aims to honour histories of resistance and the power of collective action”. Stories of struggle are woven through the exhibition. For example, Indigenous healing practices were used to counteract racist medical practices on plantations.
As the poet Audre Lorde argued, self-preservation is revolutionary, it is “an act of political warfare”. However, I think it could have included the many slave rebellions in the 18th and 19th centuries in the US and the Caribbean. The exhibition gives the example of the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, with workers carrying placards inscribed with “I am a man”.
Yet there is no mention of the ongoing, less publicised struggles of British refuse collectors. Much space is devoted to the English Collective of Prostitutes’ campaigning over the safety and health of sex workers. Again, it would have been interesting to see some space allocated to more contemporary campaigns and debates.
The exhibition shines a torch on experiences of work that are marginalised in mainstream thinking. In this exhibition we are invited to be appalled at the circumstances of these marginal workers, but not angry at the capitalist system in which this work is embedded. So the exhibition fails to identify imperialism as the major driving force of the plantation system.
It is not explicit about how the legacy of slavery and racism has criminalised black people and incarcerates them on an obscene scale in the richest country on earth. Many of these marginalised workers are women, and this is important. Yet, there are no links made between the oppression of women and the kind of work in which they find themselves.
That’s whether it is as sex workers or as workers forced leave their families to be servants to the rich in developed countries—where they can be exploited with impunity due to draconian immigration controls. This is dramatically underlined by videos of women domestic labourers talking about their experiences. Another weakness in the exhibition’s treatment of resistance.
Strikes are treated as one form of protest among many—rather than the most effective strategy for taking on employers and governments. The exhibition is extremely ambitious and imaginative and the breadth of the topic immense. So it would be unfair to criticise the curators for a limited selection of work.
But I think there are other stories to be told about the resistance of often low-paid workers—teachers, nurses, call centre workers—whose jobs on the front line condemn them to poor physical and mental health. The exhibition is free and well worth a visit. Although I notice that you would have to work as a cleaner for nearly an hour to buy a bowl of soup in the café.
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