Camera Austria #170

Karimah Ashadu, in her films, portrays male protagonists at work—motorcycle taxi drivers, a cowboy, and a shadow boxer in Lagos—while Plateau (2021) examines the structures of tin mining on Nigeria’s Jos Plateau during the 1960s, after British colonial rule had ended. Gabe Beckhurst writes: “Through a cross-pollination of sound, image, and text, Ashadu’s films filter hyper-masculinist archetypes,” while also reconnecting “the statistical abstractions of workers in the informal sector between West Africa and Europe to first-person experiences.”

Based on specific situations and production sites, Olena Newkryta explores how the Western project of modernity, the drive for expansion, and contemporary neocapitalism have an impact on individual people. Here, her special interest lies in making the unseen visible, or in forms of labor neglected by the “grand narratives.” Anne Faucheret, in her essay, analyzes how the artist gently traces “the genealogies of contemporary subjugation and extraction,” and how she looks at “the little daily revolutionary glitches made of contestation, persistence, and endurance.”

In Fotografie mit verdorbenem Korn (Photography with Tainted Grain, 2024–ongoing), Heiko Schäfer immerses himself in the postindustrial working spheres of AI start-ups and fintech companies, aiming to record through photographs the workers’ daily activity and to engage in conversation with them. His photo-text project works repeatedly against forms of the documentary and arrives at a crossroads between “normality” and self-deception. “This is what makes capital so uncanny—its actions are real and palpable, but depersonalized. Schäfer’s photographs make visible what otherwise remains concealed behind the semblance of normality,” as Jan Philipp Nühlen notes.

The essay “At the Bottom of the Trays,” cowritten by Alexander Rischer and Nora Sdun, opens up another kind of workday altogether. Here, the authors conjure an analogue photo lab in the form of a swimming pool, which is subjected to an inspection. This reveals, at the edge of the pool, diverse views on the (working) conditions of our present day, on the flawed nature of photography, and on cognitive faculty through images.

Maryam Jafri addresses the element of lithium in No Lithium, No Work (2023) and Navigating the Future (2024), for in the long-term treatment of bipolar disorders it has come to be seen as a most effective medicine. At the same time, it is the main ingredient in rechargeable batteries, which keep nearly all devices in our technology-laden present running. It is “a substance that holds a kind of recursive power, regulating our minds and feelings while simultaneously fueling the machines and systems that devastate us,” writes Rose-Anne Gush and points out how the artist makes visible the ambivalent use of lithium carbonate as a remedy and also as a “part of a structure that exploits workers” in her assemblages and installations.

We hope you enjoy reading this issue of Camera Austria International, and we wish you a lovely summer!