‘FUSING PAINTING and video together can allow for fiction and reality…real lived experiences to come together,’ Danielle Dean tells the Voice ahead of her Tate Britain exhibition which kicks off tomorrow.
The artists work spans video, painting, installation, social practice and performance, and questions how individuals are shaped by commercial narratives around them, particularly in advertising.
Titled Amazon this new work consists of a multi-channel video installation in which Dean summons fictive landscapes to explore the changing nature of human labour, examining practices of production, data extraction and commercial advertising.
Dean explores the effects of media and cultural production on the mind and body.
Her work is imaginative, often blurring fact and fiction, using the aesthetics and language of traditional advertising to highlight and interrogate global capitalism and systems of racial discrimination.
Dean considers our relationship to products and means of production by examining technology, architecture, marketing and media as tools of subjection and oppression, which at the same time have the potential for subversion.
For Amazon, The Alabama born, London-raised artist was inspired by research into the Ford Motor archives in Detroit.
During her time there, she discovered the car manufacturer’s experimental city in Brazil, Fordlândia, built with the aim to control rubber production. The city was abandoned in 1934 after the workers rebelled against the poor working conditions and the disregard of local indigenous knowledge.
Speaking on the upcoming exhibition Dean enthused: “Fusing painting and video together can allow for fiction and reality…real lived experiences to come together.
“I have spent a lot of time looking at old Ford car adverts and how they used painting to represent the landscape in relation to cars.
“I thought a lot about these representations of the American dream and how these ideological depictions of landscape put certain humans at the center.
“This can be used to justify the neocolonial extraction of raw materials, exacerbating environmental degradation, dispossession, and racialization, especially of Indigenous peoples.”
Dean’s piece reflects on the events that led to Fordlândia’s collapse by re-enacting this history with workers from the contemporary labour-crowdsourcing marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT).
AMT digitally distributes tasks to a global remote workforce, some of whom generate data which is then used to train artificial intelligence algorithms.
Amazon traces the continuities and discontinuities between trends in the current gig economy at AMT and Ford’s industrial assembly line in Fordlândia.
For the exhibition at Tate Britain, Dean collaborated with AMT workers around the world over the past two years, directing them to film themselves in their own homes. The resulting multi-channel video work shines a light on the isolation of these roles, investigating the changing nature of labour and racial politics of global capital.
Dean said: “Mixing painting with the lived reality of the AMT workers allows for a slippage of documentary and fiction.
“This reflects the mix of times and the contrast between modes of labour in both physical and digital space, with the AMT workers from the present re-performing particular events of FordlandiA; a work camp set up in the Brazilian rainforest.
“A backstory is that the video was made in part by the Amt workers I collaborated. Each participant was sent a camera kit, with sound, lighting etc and they learnt how to shoot footage of themselves re-performing the events of FordlandiA.”
Danielle Dean – Amazon
February 5, 2022 – May 8, 2022
Supported by the Art Now Supporters Circle
Comments Form