Review | Hard Graft

Kika Hendry reviews the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition Hard Graft, which explores the relationship between work and health tracing through histories of exploitation, oppression and resistance.

Hard Graft at the Wellcome Collection introduces itself as exploring ‘the impact of work on health’. The exhibition moves through three thematic sites – the plantation, the street, and the home – asking the questions: ‘What traces does work leave on the body?’ and what are the effects of work ‘undervalued by society but crucial to how it functions?’

These introductory words on the wall beckon visitors into a powerfully moving collection of historical objects, archival ephemera from activism and protests, and artwork in a range of mediums. The items are moving dispatches from sites of oppression and resistance. Rather than the neutral-sounding ‘work, health and rights’ we are placed immediately in a space of colonial genocide, enslavement, and exploitation. Sometimes, exhibitions can express more than their curators expect. 

‘Plantation’ covers the history of plantations from slave workers in 17th century America to present-day wage labourers in Bangladesh. There isn’t a single narrative thread but a collection of potential connections between the incisive artworks. The Wellcome Collection have been sensitive to calls for museums to take anti-racism seriously, entirely shutting down Medicine Man, their leading permanent exhibit. This approach is noticeable as only few items from 19th century medic Henry Wellcome’s library are displayed, each in conversation with contemporary work.

One European book on display is the 1705 Botanical Guide to the Flora and Fauna of Suriname by Maria Sibyllan Merian. It is open to a peacock flower, a plant used by enslaved women to abort pregnancies. The painted flower alludes to many overlapping meanings: indigenous knowledge drawn out from enslaved women, a harrowing situation of the plant’s necessity, and the book as a luxury object of colonial scholarship.

Contrasting this guide – which describes the plants of a Dutch colony, as learnt by a European guest in a sugarcane plantation – are artworks about resistance through ancestral herbal knowledge, and the development of new communal environments by escaped enslaved people. In The Book of Landscapes by Maria Floriza Veríssimo twelve notebook pages face out from a wooden structure. Veríssimo lives in a Quilombo in Brazil, a settlement established by escaped plantation workers dating back four hundred years. Her work is written in and about the local landscape that sustains her community. Below a green leafy drawing (in English translation): ‘There are many summer plants, and planted in the waxing moon they regenerate and sustain our living!!!’

The contemporary artwork featured in Hard Graft allows its exploration of plantations to feel viscerally present. Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq’s has developed close relationships with workers on tea plantations in Sylhet in Bangladesh, and his photographic series Dark Garden emerges as evidence of this trust. In Sylhet, workers do not have the right to own land, earning an average daily wage of £1.13 through informal work. 

In one photograph, a hand disfigured by a machinery accident is staged horizontally across a black background. In another image a close-up of an eye blinded by pesticides is rendered in visceral colour. Elsewhere, a figure in a white veil raises their hands as if in prayer, while low, green, tea plants recede into the horizon.

The photographic collection understands the plantation as a space of living things: workers, plants, fireflies. They show the painful reality of how people and landscapes are scarred by the exploitation of colonial and capitalist industry, but also that they are not totally erased. Fatiq’s series is ongoing, representing a community that exists at the same time as the works are on display.

In ‘Post-Plantation’ and ‘Prison’ sections the exhibition emphasises how the oppression of slavery is reproduced today in the prison-industrial complex and capitalist industry. Overlapping all the art in the room is audio from a video essay and documentary of activism by residents in Louisiana (entitled: ‘If toxic air is a monument to slavery, how do we take it down?’) produced by Forensic Architecture with RISE St James.

Along the Mississippi river, on the sites of hundreds of former sugar cane plantations, are hundreds of chemical industrial plants, directly reproducing the oppression of slaveholders over the lives of Black residents. On a town council map, homes of the majority-Black former Freetown are described as ‘existing residential/future industrial’. Residents are organising and campaigning to prevent Formosa Oil building another chemical plant which would suffocate them and their descendents and uproot the sacred burial grounds of their ancestors.

In her audio guide to Hard Graft, curator Cindy Sissoko describes the exhibition as focussed on ‘unconventional spaces of work’. Would the offices of Formosa Oil count as a conventional space? Is it right to describe a tea plantation as an ‘unconventional’ space? The collection that Hard Graft presents allows visitors to grapple with these questions themselves, and arrive at their own conclusions, which may be broader and angrier than the text on the wall.

Next, ‘The Street’ considers the unregulated economies of sanitation and sex work. Documents of strike action tell the story of oppression and resistance. Although, in the shadow of the just-ended film, newspaper clippings appear a little flat. 

Here is a photograph from a 1968 strike by sanitation workers in Memphis, in the wake of two men killed at work. A sea of placards read: ‘I AM A MAN’. Here are items from the English Collective of Prostitutes, Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement (SWARM) collective, Wages for Housework (‘All mothers are working mothers!’), and photographs from chambermaids at Ibis Batignolles, Paris, campaigning on the street. The space is shaped by a sculpture of a chapel, ‘Money Makes the World Go Round’ by Lindsey Mendick, evoking the 12-day occupation of the nearby Holy Cross Church in Kings Cross by the English Collective of Prostitutes. Mendick was asked whether she considers sex work to be liberatory or exploitative: ‘I never had to choose … the point is that they are poor, most are mothers … [and] low pay and benefits are below what you need’.

All these items make visible the toil that workers are forced to do discreetly for low pay and in unsafe conditions, and celebrates moments of historic resistance. However, perhaps with time radical strikes can become palatable cultural objects in a way that current actions for workers rights cannot. Recent strikes by security guards at London’s major museums represented by UVW feel relevant, illuminating that museums are commercial employers and can exploit a casualised and largely migrant workforce, too. London’s museums have also been the site of campaigns demanding climate justice and exposing ties to Israel’s arms industry. In exposing the dangers of working on the street Hard Graft also highlights how the street is where campaigns for justice are enacted.

The final section of Hard Graft addresses the largest sector of work that is endured substantially in silence and away from the public eye: domestic labour. Here artworks communicate an emotional and material complexity that archival documents can’t match.

Kelly O’Brien’s work No Rest For the Wicked makes visible a century of women just-about subsisting. ‘Three Generations of Work CV (Paid and Unpaid Labour)’ is a white sheet of paper, typed up vertically: ‘born, factory worker, looked after child, cared for mother, cleaner, born, barmaid, died, cleaner, looked after child’. Low-paid jobs and caring responsibilities are passed down between mothers and daughters. The sparse descriptive words speak of hard lives. The last line, describing Kelly herself, is ‘Lecturer – zero hours contract’. Even now, from the position she made this work, she is in precarious employment.  

In Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, Marxist feminist Sheila Rowbotham writes that: ‘The oppressed without hope are mysteriously quiet. When the concept of change is beyond the limits of the possible, there are no words to articulate discontent, so it is sometimes held not to exist. This mistaken belief arises because we can only grasp silence in the moment in which it is breaking.’

At the end of the exhibition is a TV-screen with two headphones. I waited my turn for the headphones and then passed them on to the woman waiting for them behind me. 

In Our Story by Voice of Domestic Workers, Joycle Niayna and Tassia Kobyloinska migrant domestic workers in Britain describe their lives: how they wanted better lives for their children, leaving them behind to travel across continents to look after the houses and children of other women.

They describe abuse by their employers: only allowed to leave the house for two hours a month, called slurs, never being paid, families lying about renewing their visas. Accompanying the audio are videos that the women have taken, at risk, of the inside of the rich London houses which are just nearby.  

They describe fleeing: I left without my passport. I left with a plastic bag, I ran. In unison: ‘Enough is enough. We organise, we campaign, we organise, we campaign… Together our voices echoes the world. We are workers. We are domestic workers.’

The video is short. What happened after they escaped? How did they find help? Have they seen their families? Hard Graft ends on this urgent note from the present, directing you back out into the world: the toilets, the cafe, the gift shop, the street, the home: spaces maintained by hard work.  

Hard Graft is on at Wellcome Collection until 27 April.