Funded by a foundation founded by nineteenth-century Big Pharma businessman Henry Wellcome, the Wellcome Collection exhibits are all connected to health and wellness in some way. Mr. Wellcome was also a collector, and his legacy includes a museum-sized archive of books, photographs and materials related to social and medical life. Curators of the Wellcome collection are given access to the archive and can select bits and bobs to match the themes of each exhibition. It’s not as hard as it sounds. The museum’s 2023 exhibition, “The Cult of Beauty”, dissected attitudes towards beauty, from the origins of the male gaze to the deceptive cod science cosmetics industry. An exhibition of pieces from the likes of performance artist Narcissister and the activist and Makeupbrutalism project of Eszter Magyar is juxtaposed with seventeenth-century vanitas artworks that convey the emptiness of the pursuit of beauty.
Next, the Group’s exhibition “Hard Graft: Work, Life and Rights” stops early. As visitors enter the space, the sign tells them that the exhibition explores the links between underrepresented work, the people who make it and where it takes place. Oh well. Putting together a show about something as big as work couldn’t be easier, and the logo explains the survey’s focus. “Hard Graft” is divided into three sections—The Plantation, The Street and Home—each section containing a mix of artefacts from the Wellcome collection’s archives and borrowed images chosen to embody the main themes of the exhibition.
The plantation section looks at the lives of farm workers, from sixteenth-century slaves to traditional Chinese communities. Most of the pieces shown are linked to empirical evidence and used to illustrate a point. Md Fazia Rabbi Fatiq’s photographs document the on-the-job injuries suffered by contemporary Bangladeshi farm workers, and Charmaine Watkiss’s ethereal paintings celebrate herbal remedies passed down over the years by members of the African diaspora. Photo by Vivian Caccuri Mosquito Temple is an embroidered mosquito net that tells how slave ships from Africa to Brazil in the 1500s brought mosquitoes that spread malaria and yellow fever throughout the country. A 2021 film from environmental activists Forensic Architecture, If toxic air is a reminder of slavery, how do we get rid of it? investigates Louisiana’s Death Alley oil refineries built on the site’s enslaved graveyard.
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The Street includes prostitutes, street vendors, sanitation workers and their informal economic workers. We have a lot to show for the new exhibition commission, by Lindsey Mendick. Money makes the world go round. Created in collaboration with SWARM—Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement—and black non-binary writer Mendez, the installation is designed to look like an altar, complete with stained-glass windows. At center screen, Mendez tells the story of a young black hired boy who works the streets of London against the Bible’s themes of hypocrisy. Glazed clay money boxes on the pews in front of the altar represent prostitutes’ money, and SWARM’s involvement underscores their campaign for rights and safety in the sex industry. It’s all lovely and confusing. Perhaps the easiest to work with is Cassi Namoda who was born in Mozambique Self-hatred in 100 Per cent Humidity hanging silently on the wall in front of them, a painting full of burning regret.
It forms part of the section The Home (dedicated to unpaid domestic work and its emotional and physical effects), the second commission of the exhibition, Vietnamese artist Moi Tran’s. Chains of Care (Love Will Go On)it is a circular room covered with gray pictures of the hands of the housekeepers. Created with the help of Voice of Domestic Workers, a London-based organization that works to empower migrant domestic workers in the UK, the film of the workers’ bodies is zoomed in from above, down a round table in the center of the room. Guests are encouraged to place their hands on the table and feel the vibrations from the blasting installation music. Rather than participating in a gentle conversation, as the frustration and sadness of the staff are communicated through physical and verbal changes in the room.
Shannon Alonzo A female washerwoman he lives next door. A headless body made of yellow, varnished linen, wax and clothespins, the Trinidadian artist’s figure is a husk of a woman stripped of hard domestic work. The nails look like broken teeth that are eating themselves. Collection of Lubaina Himid Steel Handkerchiefs paintings line the opposite wall, each one affixed with cryptic health and safety messages. Nearby, Dr. Joyce Jiang and Tassia Kobylinska’s 2019 filmOur Journeyit hurts my heart. Both are also involved with Voice of Domestic Workers, and their film shows women from Southeast Asia and Africa speaking about their loneliness and the abuse they face at the hands of their British employers.
“Hard Graft” is a powerful, in-depth survey, and the selection of archival material adds gravity to the themes explored. A notebook page with handwritten lyrics to an eighteenth-century African song intended to tell a slave owner about the despair his field workers were suffering is touching. However, given the show’s stated aims of bullying and welfare in the workplace, the lack of anything clear about it died the system of modern slavery used by many countries in the Middle East feels like a missed opportunity. In April this year, the Guardian interviewed fifty female domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Jordan to show that the system it died continues to harass migrant workers. If the images of migrant laborers sweeping the streets of the UAE shown here (taken by Dubai-based artist Vikram Divecha) are meant to represent a living hell it diedtheir effect is very subtle. Especially since, ideally, no punches are pulled elsewhere.
“Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights” is on view at the Wellcome Collection in London until April 27, 2025. Admission is free.
