Thinking inside-out: The ABC of the projectariat

In the joint lecture series »thinking inside-out« by ZKM and HfG, we invite international guests from the fields of philosophy, literature, and art to an open exchange with university members, ZKM staff and the people of Karlsruhe.

The ABC of the projectariat
Lecture performance and discussion with Kuba Szreder

Projects are strange creatures. They allow artists to organize their activities beyond the gallery-exhibition nexus, leave their studios, mobilize resources, engage multitudes, cross disciplines. Projects help people to make collective use of their art. On the other hand, projects can be tools of neoliberal management, when embedded in the cruel economies of contemporary art. Rushing from deadline to deadline, forced to accept temporary contracts, artists, curators and other art workers have to finish one project after another and many at the same time. As “projectarians”, they move in an art world in which enthusiasm is paired with exclusion, mobility with poverty, and self-entrepreneurship with anxiety. They either circulate or perish.

In his book »The ABC of the projectariat« (2021), Kuba Szreder analyzes the precarious working conditions in the ever-expanding networks of contemporary art. From »A is for Aftermath (of the pandemic)« to »Y is for You are Not Alone«, he addresses a fundamental ambivalence of organizing projects, which shifts between promises of facilitating artistic practice and a harsh reality of winner-takes-it-all economy, structurally marked by competition and exclusion. 

»Just as proletarians had nothing to lose but their chains, the projectarians have nothing to miss but their deadlines.«

Based on a random selection of entries from the ABC, in his performative lecture Szreder will address the ups and downs of this unpredictable existence. This will be followed by a discussion with Alistair Hudson, the scientific-artistic director of ZKM, and Constanze Fischbeck, the deputy director of the HfG, on the current debate about precarious work in art and more broadly in creative industries.

»The ABC of the projectariat: living and working in a precarious art world« (2021) is published by Whitworth and Manchester University Press. It is also available at the ZKM Shop.