Putting Life to Work | La vie mise au travail (2017)
Putting Life to Work | La vie mise au travail
Solo Exhibition in Two Parts
Curated by Véronique Leblanc
Owens Art Gallery
Sackville, New Brunswick
January 20 - March 12, 2017
Galerie d’art Louise-et-Reuben-Cohen
Moncton, Canada
January 27 - March 26, 2017
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens’ art practice investigates the ways in which the economic sciences and the theories of management represent the world. It focuses on the influence of productivist logic on all spheres of human activity.
The exhibition looks at the internalization of productivity by individuals in works realized since 2009, including the new installation Each Number Equals One Inhalation and One Exhalation.
The installations, sculptures, videos, and performative projects selected by the curator Véronique Leblanc examine the ways in which the injunction to perform affects the body-actions, thought, attitudes, language-from the point of view of work and life, two spheres that tend to be conflated within a model that many researchers refer to as “cognitive capitalism.” The works underline the physiological, subjective and cognitive dimensions of the body and is a central element in the artists’ critical stance against neoliberalism’s ideology. It is defined both as the site where the mechanisms of productivity are realized and as an agent of their disabling.
Works presented: Each Number Equals One Inhalation and One Exhalation; and Real failure needs no excuse.