Afterwork

In conjunction with the exhibition in our physical gallery, Assembly presents “Afterwork” by Rodrigo Valenzuela. Based on the ghostly absence of workers in an indeterminate time and place, this work is at once futuristic and harking back to a century ago.

In staged sets suggesting abandoned factories, Valenzuela wishfully foments a revolution, enabling workers powerless in the face of relentless international movement of capital to flee or perhaps overrun their workplaces. As in a science-fiction universe where we feel a potential reality just out of reach of our present, Valenzuela’s scenes meld mechanical objects with steam or smoke, suggestive of steel manufacturing, a cloud of sweat-the only bodily proof of human toil-or a cinematic trope of futuristic atmosphere. In these eerily depopulated scenes, viewers are prompted to envision alternative possibilities to histories of workers dispossessed, or made obsolete, and industries that thrived on human pain.