The great classic themes of industrialization and industrial photography are factories, workers, machines, blast furnaces, steel casting, assembly line work, and much more. But that is only half the story. Industrialization reached much further, much deeper, and it was and is highly complex. It became not only the basis of a new economy, but of a new society, a new structure of life, a new state of mind, an all-encompassing system of human beings. It has not only driven and standardized our external life, our workplace, working hours, traffic routes, means of transport, and gradual mechanization and automation, but also our inner life. We have been industrialized, globalized, digitized.
This year's five finalists of the MAST Grant are also noticeably wide-ranging in the field of industry. Kai Waikowski , for example, deals with the life of his grandmother. She emigrated from Poland to Australia, but was never able to really gain a foothold in her new “home” in terms of work. Kai visualizes on the one hand the story of this inability to gain a foothold on the new continent, and on the other hand the story of “work despite unemployment”, of “work after work”, of employment as thinking, as being, as a motor for life, physically and mentally.
After meticulous research, Sheida Soleimani develops complex constellations in her multi-layered wall paintings and pictorial installations from the traumatic stories of her own family – who fled from Iran – the partly unheard, suppressed experiences of women in the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, and the migratory birds are injured by all the buildings and structures that we humans have built and continue to build.
In her work, Silvia Rosi deals with a topic that is as big as it is – in our part of the world – almost unknown. The wax print, the wax fabric in Togo and many other African countries. The one-meter-wide fabric panels with many colorful designs are sold in Togo by so-called Nana Benz. In Togo, Nana means “mother” or “grandmother”, while the second part actually refers to the famous car brand. Nana Benz were businesswomen, and the first to import these cars. At the same time, they supported the independence movement by hiding messages within the fabric they sold and transported across the city.
Gosette Lubundo took photographs and filmed here in Lukula, a city in the province of Congo Central in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She visited industries that emerged during the colonial era and gradually went bankrupt in the years following independence. She visited former workers who still occasionally check on the dilapidated buildings and do small jobs there. She stages herself together with them in the industrial area, where the ruins, old machines, nature and the utopia of a possible resurrection of this time, of these industries, blend into a melancholy visual canto.
Finally, in her work “Autonomous Body”, Felicity Hammond takes us directly back to industrial production and its effects. She writes: “This project aims to make new connections between the history and future of car manufacturing and the extractive processes that enable it. It will explore how both the tangible and intangible processes of car production are globally networked, from mine to machine.”