Par les temps qui courent

Following on from the symposium Art et travail – culture et entreprise : nouveaux horizons organised by the Saint-Nazaire Centre de Culture Populaire (C.C.P.), Le Grand Café – Contemporary Art Centre, Saint-Nazaire, is presenting a group exhibition at Le LiFE that brings together fourteen artists, predominantly working with video, around the question of work in today’s world.

Whether the backdrop to the works on show concern the great mutations relating to the end of the industrial world, the fall of the economic model of the 1970s or the more recent passage to the financialization of society, all of them go beyond simple description and take a critical view of the place of the individual in the world of work.

A number of the artists indicate, with causticity and humour, the faults of the system, the new forms of alienation and imposed conformism. All of them remind us that work cannot be looked at and analysed today without an understanding of its links to an economy that has become globalised.

Ultimately, the questions of the meaning and value – real or supposed – that are attached to work run through this exhibition, articulated around two axes: the disappearance of one world and the advent of new codes and spaces of power. If certain artists allow us to glimpse possible forms of resistance, they also show the difficulty of constructing global collective action, leaving only the active or inactive individual faced with an increasingly complex system.