“There is something necessarily abstract about industry—it’s a difficult concept to think at a human scale. [In the Merriam-Webster dictionary] industry can be understood as a set of wholes, groups, enterprises, departments, businesses, personnel, systems, and systematic activity.” Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa opens his essay on Kai Wasikowski with a remarkable statement. In the writer’s eyes, however, it is possible for industry to be much more concrete: “Industry is what we do, is who we are, is what we need, is where we work (live?), is what we resent, is what despoils the things we cherish, excludes us, defines us, is that which ploughs the furrow of opportunity at scale, is possibility for advancement [...].” He is not concerned with systems or corporations, but rather with concrete action, activity, endeavor, but also hardship. Following this perspective, industry appears like a kind of kraken, born within the human fabric, the fabric of humanity (or at least a part of it) in the last 250 years and rapidly, continuously, grotesquely developing, always connected with enormous innovative zeal and superb expertise, but also with sprawling might and (increasingly) gargantuan torrents of money. Consequently, industry has always also meant power, sometimes even tremendous power. This kraken has not only driven and standardized our daily life, places of work, working hours, transport routes, means of transport, the incremental mechanization and automatization—that is to say, the “objectification” of life; it has done the same to our inner life as well. Such radically changing external parameters always have an impact on the intricate inner life, on thoughts, feelings, and sensations, on the being of each individual person. This kraken has thereby become a comprehensive arterial system for almost the entire planet, it penetrates and utterly encompasses industrial and post-industrial society with its digital tools, networks, and—today—algorithm- and AI-supported thinking. We are industrialized, globalized, digitized. And thus we have ourselves become a product.

The classical themes of industrialization and of industrial photography are factories, workers, machines, furnaces, steel casting, assembly line work, and more besides. Yet, that is the point: Industrialization goes much further, much deeper, and it is highly complex. It became a new society, a new structure of life, a new state of mind, an all-encompassing system for humans. The finalists of this year’s MAST Photography Grant range extensively through the field of the industrial sphere, sometimes even moving far from its core. And yet all their works are related to it, are all ultimately closely entwined with industry.

Kai Wasikowski takes his inspiration from the life of his grandmother. She migrated from Poland to Australia but was never able to establish herself professionally in her new “homeland.” The artist visualizes on the one hand the history of this “running aground,” this “running dry,” despite social and architecture studies, this inability to gain a foothold on the new continent, and, on the other hand, the history of “employment despite unemployment,” of “work after work,” of employment as thinking, as being, as an engine for life, physically and mentally. In his own words: “My project focuses on the displaced and repurposed industrial skills and labor of elderly Polish migrants in my hometown of Canberra, Australia. The starting point is my grandmother, who migrated with my mother from Poland to Australia on a cargo ship in the 1970s. Despite having established a career in shipping and cargo logistics in Poland, my grandmother was unable to apply her skills and knowledge in Australia. This is a common experience shared by migrant workers in Australia who—depending on their point of origin, gender and English fluency—grappled with the ongoing repercussions of the White Australia Policy and were often denied jobs in their industry of trade.” In his work, entitled The Bees and the Ledger, Wasikowski creates a careful inventory of objects that are of importance, of significance for his grandmother on different levels. 

Sheida Soleimani writes in the presentation of her project, Flyways: “I seek to make […] a new series of photographs oriented around two modes of labor urgently needed in a world driven by the direct—and indirect—destruction of human and nonhuman life. In this series—the first to represent the explicit connections that link my work as an artist to my work as a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator—I create flight paths out of the human destruction of life towards more just multi-species futures. In these tableaux photographs, I superimpose two narratives: the stories of the women of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and those of injured migratory birds. Thus just as my own labor practices converge in this series, these stories, told independently via source imagery and charged objects and symbols, converge in the figures of birds under my care. This is a project about the emergence of new modes of medical, aesthetic, and ethical practices of repair.” I am tempted to add: Care, share, and conservation. Having undertaken painstaking research, in her multifaceted murals and photographic installations, Soleimani develops complex constellations out of the traumatic history of her own family (who fled Iran), the often unheard, suppressed experiences of women in the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, and the migratory birds that are injured by the buildings and structures that we humans have erected and continue to build. At the same time, her various identities—Iranian, American, artist, wildlife rehabilitator—come together to produce a heightened social sensibility, which she succinctly expresses: “I have spent my life learning how infrastructures wound and kill in different ways. In my experience, urban and workplace infrastructure is responsible for an obscene number of deaths, and it is against this grim background that I propose to make this series.” In her clinic in Providence, the “Congress of the Birds,” as she calls it, in honor of a Persian poem, she gives sanctuary to and cares for around 1000 animals every year, in particular songbirds. Most of these have been injured on glass windows and walls, which have been given ever greater surface area in contemporary architecture, especially in office towers. Soleimani excoriates this industry for its destructive power. “Window strikes are only one of the leading causes of neurological impairment and death. Other common causes of the 1.4 billion birds that die annually in the United States from human-made problems include collisions with automobiles and wind turbines; electrocution by power lines; rat poison and pesticide, usually used around large buildings such as offices, hospitals, and apartment buildings; and habitat loss and construction.”

Silvia Rosi, born in northern Italy, is the daughter of parents from Togo. Her work, Kɔdi, focuses on a topic that is as huge as it is—at least in Europe—almost unknown: wax printed fabric. In Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Addis Abeba, Dakar, Bamako, Lagos, Accra, and specially in Lomé in Togo, wax prints define the urban life of many cities on the African continent. The one-meter-wide bolts of fabric with over 350,000 colorful designs are turned into dresses, shirts, shoes, bags, parasols, and furniture coverings. For a long time, the fabrics were manufactured in Europe, in the textile factories of the colonial powers. The term for these colorful prints goes back to the nature of their manufacture. The process is similar to batik art. Using wax templates, different patterns are printed onto the woven fabrics and then dyed. The wax layer creates a barrier for the fabric on the printed areas and leaves a pattern behind after dying. Finally, the wax layer is removed with heat. There are virtually no limits set on imagination – or so we outsiders believe, until we come to understand the story referred to in the work, that of Nana Benz. In Togo, Nana means “mother” or “grandmother,” while the second part of the name references the famous automobile brand. Nana Benz were business women, and the first to import this vehicle. Rosi puts it like this: “The project I am developing is a series of portraits and self-portraits inspired by the history of the Nana Benz, the influential women traders of Lomé, Togo, who dominated the fabric trade. These women played a vital yet often overlooked role in the country’s history, particularly during the struggle for independence. Through oral history shared with me during my trip to Togo, I learned that some Nana Benz secretly supported the independence movement by hiding messages within the fabric they sold and transported across the city. This undocumented history not only reframes the role of women in the fight for independence but also adds another dimension to the symbolic layers already embedded in the fabric itself. Wax fabrics often carry meanings tied to womanhood and the role of women in society. In this series, I use fabrics with names like ‘My Husband is Capable’ and ‘The Family’ to explore how these textiles communicated ideas of femininity while also serving as vehicles for hidden messages.” The photographs, the portraits, are inspired by classical studio portraits of the kind with which we are familiar from African photographic tradition. 

Gosette Lubondo photographs and films in Lukula, a city and territory of the province of Kongo Central, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The artist visits industries that were created during the colonial era and gradually failed in the years after independence. She explains that these industries, which were part of the “civilizing mission” of the colonial system, were mainly specialized in the manufacture of wood and regional products. She visits former employees, who, even today, continue to look after the disintegrating buildings and carry out small jobs. She portrays herself together with them in the industrial grounds, on which the walls, old machines, nature, and the utopia of a possible resurgence of this time, of these industries, converge to a melancholy visual canto. In Imaginary Trip III, we become witnesses to a paradoxical situation in which joy for the liberation from the colonial powers is mixed with the loss of industries and jobs. Bear in mind the context: There are two Congos, Congo Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Congo Brazzaville, the Republic of Congo. Together, they form a vast region—approximately eight times the size of Germany—with lush forests, mighty rivers, and rich natural resources of gold, diamonds, cobalt, uranium, copper, and much more. France and the King of Belgium, the two colonial powers, divided the Congo basin into two zones in line with their own interests and imperial ambitions. The division remained in place even after decolonization, to this day.

Finally, Felicity Hammond leads us directly into industrial production and its consequences in her work Autonomous Body. 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.” Felicity grew up in the area around Birmingham, the center of the British automotive industry. Her life was and remains strongly, though ambivalently, connected with the car. Her father worked in this industry, she herself suffered a car accident and lost a close friend in a traffic collision. Her “sculptures” in the exhibition are complex, dense assemblages in which the routes of automotive manufacturing—from the mine to the material and on to the finished car—and those of photography—from its basic materials to the picture—intersect at several points. Photography visualizes this route, while the self-driving, automated car is increasingly becoming a picture-generating machine. All processes and procedures are visually documented and transferred onward. Kim Knoppers nominated Hammond for the MAST Photography Grant and, as is the case for all the other finalists, subsequently composed the contribution to this book. It is a complex, highly interesting text, which engages closely with the artist’s work and opens up many facets of her project to the reader. It closes with a quote from Crash, the novel by J.G. Ballard: “Technological society has replaced the natural world with a world of symbols and signs, where the car crash is the ultimate symbol of our alienation from nature.” Astonishingly, Ballard penetrated the essence of how societies work as early as 1973. “Are we, then, careening not only into a real traffic collision, but also into a metaphorical one?”, Knoppers ultimately asks. And perhaps even into a mental and emotional one? That is what we must all ask ourselves when confronted with the climate crisis and the frenzied social media situation of today and tomorrow.