Charlotte Bank Projects
Mohamed Badarne: Come back Safely (2013)

Lost in Work

 

Artists: Simone Zaugg, Mohamed Badarne


 April 28th – May 7th 2017, Fri - Sun 4 – 7 p.m.

The exhibition “Lost in Work“ presents works by two Berlin-based artists who examine different aspects of the theme “work“. The sound installation “Work Station” (2008) by Simone Zaugg fills the space with 8 headphones hanging from the ceiling. In each a different workers’ song is heard, highlighting different approaches to work from Egypt to Jamaica and Scandinavia to Armenia.

The artist learnt, sang and performed the songs herself and thus sought to investigate diverse facets of the theme between aggression, despair and joy. Work songs have traditionally accompanied work, they can express satisfaction and liberation, they can articulate a political positioning and reflect the self-empowerment of the workers.
 

Mohamed Badarne’s project “Come Back Safely” (2013) addresses the lives of construction workers who are often forced to earn their living under dangerous conditions and with minimal safety measures. The photos are carefully staged, according to the same principles as frames in a film and always created in collaboration with the people in them. They show the workers at work, during moments of rest and contemplation, in prayer and in company.

The images offer intimate and poetic insights into a world in which human beings are often reduced to anonymous numbers in statistics, yet remain unseen and unrecognized. Badarne’s photos show Palestinian workers who work on construction sites in Israel. Here, they do not appear as the sad and passive victims of a capitalist system run wild that force a growing number of people to seek work far away from their families, but rather as fellow human beings with histories, dreams and wishes of their own.

 

Simone Zaugg: Work Station (2008)
Charlotte Bank Projects | charlotte.bank.art@gmail.com