According to Marx, primitive accumulation, beginning with enclosures and the consequent expropriation of land from peasants, was a key phase in the emergence of capitalism. The transformation of the labor relationship between peasants and land helps us understand the origins of the contemporary abstraction of labor, and, similarly, offers a territory of analysis from which new forms of anti-capitalist economic models can emerge, and thrive. Driven by new class consciousness, since the beginning of 2024, farmers have engaged in widespread strikes and protests across European countries, leading to significant changes in the EU's green policies in advance of the European Parliament elections of this year. Despite comprising only 4.2% of the EU's workforce, and contributing only 1.4% to its GDP, farmers have a substantial impact on EU policy, particularly in rural areas where significant discontent with distant policymakers and deep-rooted concerns about cultural identity are proliferating. These protests highlight the political power of farmers and underscores the fact that the consequences of politics, often considered largely an urban affair, profoundly affect rural communities and their economies.
Against this political and discursive backdrop, Katalin Erdődi and Aleksei Borisionok - the curators of the Biennale Matter of Art, organized for three editions now by tranzit.cz - are interested in looking into the shifts happening in the countryside as a driving force of social change. The Biennale, running until September in Prague, grafts the rural and the urban as sociogenic spheres, articulating the role of peasant communities in defining the identities of post-Soviet countries. To emphasize these connections, the majority of the Biennale’s exhibition and public program takes place in the National Gallery Prague, the former Trade Fair Palace, a gem of Czech functionalist architecture that served the Prague Sample Trade Fairs company, and, after the Second World War, housed various foreign trade companies.
fig. 1
The Sonic and Symbolic: Voices of the Land
My first encounter with the Biennale was a sonic one, composed of the joint melody created by Hungarian Peasants in Atmosphere and the Czech Lada Choir. The chants, performed by singers dressed in traditional clothes moving through the venue, were enmeshed with the sounds of modular synthesizers and other instruments. The sounds evoked hard work and solidarity in the fields and featured ballads about the lives of women, emphasizing the role of orality in the transmission of rural knowledge and in the empowerment of women. According to Silvia Federici, the body of the woman, as the machine of social reproduction and unpaid care labor, is another locus of primitive accumulation. Women's roles are ubiquitous in the exhibition, calling attention to feminist social epistemologies, wherein attunement to, and care for, the land are major aspects of community building and resistance to the stranglehold of patriarchal extractivism.
fig. 2
An example of this women-land alliance is found in Pinar Ogrenci’s installation Resisting Forest (2019), which narrates the Black Sea women's struggle to defend their land from the construction of a thermal plant in Gerze, Türkiye, and a hydroelectric power plant in Aslandere. Armed with wooden sticks, these women stood against the police and the occupants of the plant. They used their sticks as sound instruments to amplify their demands. The sound of the sticks resonates in the high-ceiling hall of the National Gallery, and accompanies a video work where women share their experiences. In the video, one of the participants says, “The [investors] are welcome to sit and eat with us, but not to steal our streams.” Their stories touch upon abuses of power and the process of criminalization, with one woman recounting how her son was targeted and jailed by police as an indirect way to stop their protest.
Historical and Contemporary Struggles
The history of workers’ struggles is part of the history of human emancipation from domination and subjugation. We see that decolonization and land sovereignty movements carried out by indigenous communities worldwide highlight the tight relationship between cultural belonging and physical territory, and how extractivism operates in severing this bond. This is evident today in the Palestinian people's struggle to defend themselves against Israeli settler colonialism, for example, where land and self-determination are central issues in the conflict.
fig. 3
The acknowledgment of the condition of oppression by the oppressed group is a central theme in These Conditions (2022-2023), a multichannel installation by Adelita Husni Bey. Part of the artist's broader engagement with Augusto Boal’s concept of the Theater of the Oppressed, the work on the show follows a workshop held by Husni Bey with essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the workshop, they processed and exorcized their fears engendered by a system that does not provide, in return for their necessary labor, basic social security. Along with the video documentation, graphic red and black images narrate historical pandemic-induced workers’ uprisings, such as the Peasant’s Revolt in England in 1381, and the Gravedigger Rebellion during the Italian plague in 1631, to chronicle the relationship between pandemics and social change and workers’ roles. As pandemics affect human health, they are also enmeshed in ideological projects and social redistribution, which do not leave the subject of land untouched. As we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, many workers from Eastern European countries were employed, due to the lack of domestic workforce in countries including Germany, often with bare minimum protections to work in the fields for vital food production.
fig. 4
The quality of farmers' and peasants' lives and work is often determined by the economic fluctuations and crises produced by global markets. As mentioned by Erdődi in the exhaustive Biennale reader Sowing Unrest, the time is ripe for establishing a more solid “rural internationalism” among countries, especially post-Soviet ones. This urgency is expressed in Tomáš Uhnák's multimedia installation The Spectre of Peasantry (2024), in which the artist reflects on the lack of identification of Eastern European, and specifically Czech, farmers with international peasants' movements such as La Via Campesina. The movement initiated the United Nations Declarations on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP) to fight for peasant and land rights. Sheltered by a cozy wooden structure, the installation explores, through a series of interviews with Czech farmers, with Asia Dér, Tamás Kaszás, and Asunción Molinos Gordo and in collaboration with Adam Čajka, Ramona Duminicioiu (Eco Ruralis, Romania), and Anna Kárníková, what it means to be a “peasant” in the minds of Eastern European farmers, linking their situated needs with broader demands.
The distortion of peasantry and rural life into an unrealistic imagination is problematized by Asunción Molinos Gordo in her work El Fellah Ando Fes (The Peasant Has a Hoe). She reveals how the work of peasant farmers in Jordan has changed by updating children's calligraphy exercises which recounted the life of farmers. The school exercises depicted old anecdotes and did not consider the new hardships of working the land. The artist displays these exercises and by twisting words and syntax positions them in realistic landscapes, where the land is dry, and farmers do not want their children to work it when they are grown.
fig. 5
Revindicating Rural Identity
The red thread running throughout the exhibition is a question of revindicating a rural identity, obstructed by the mirages of capitalism, and the romanticization of the nature-culture dichotomy. This concern reflects a prolonged struggle for Eastern European countries, which are haunted by the unprocessed memory of the Soviet period, and which are still searching for ways to disentangle their future from capitalist horizons. The Biennale encourages them to begin with the land and its cultures as ways to elaborate on the traumas of the past while remaining wary of the false promises of grandiosity offered by Western capitalism. A poetic example of this process is offered by Alicja Rogalska’s installation Flowers of Resilience (2024). The work is a two-part collaboration between the artist, Platforma Vykvet, an initiative that grows flowers in Czechia, and florists of different generations. They recount how their work was done during the ostensibly Socialist era, and how the Velvet Revolution had changed the perspective on flower design from sober compositions to more dramatic visuals. Flowers, for Rogalska, become powerful channels through which to provide an account of history, as well as to keep tradition alive and reflective of social changes.
fig. 6
While Rogalska’s main admiration is for carnations, Kateřina Konvalinová and Judita Levitnerová care for sheep and work in wool production. During State Socialist times, new technologies, such as the “Art Protis” technique, where fleece wool is stitched by a machine onto a fabric backing after being layered by artisans’ hands, were developed to create cheap tapestries at an industrial scale. The artists are interested in the changes in the textile and sheep wool industry that took place after the socialist era. Since 1989, wool lost much of its market value, and the Art Protis technology has become outdated. In a tender installation, Rusty Sheep Dreaming (2024), the artists embrace but also question the idea of “uselessness’, offering a soft shelter for visitors to rest in where they can listen to stories emerging from pastures, and processes of herding, and shearing.
fig. 7
The layers of meaning created by the artworks on show are organized using a set of symbols, connecting them to a specific glossary that evokes rural/labor relationships: a raised fist, water irrigation machinery, rakes, roots, flowers, hammers, haystacks, protest signs, and minerals. This choice seems to expand on the traditional Communist hammer-and-sickle iconography, depicting a variety of tools and environments related to labor, and creating a continuum between the farm and industry workers’ struggles instead of a sharp dichotomy. Whether the first tools of labor were those deployed to work the land, these tools have been slowly subtracted by the invisible hand of the market. This process of alienation is beautifully illustrated by Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze in The Invisible Hand of My Father (2018). The film portrays the artist’s father, who, following the Soviet Union's collapse, sought work in Western Europe amid Georgia's ensuing economic crisis. An accident, caused by the precarity of Western work conditions, cost him a hand. The video uses the lost hand as an example to speak about an unequal economic system that exploited the post-Soviet economic crisis to access cheap labor.
By bringing about practices situated and traditional to Eastern European countries, the Biennale encourages, at the crossroads of the socialist past and capitalist present, a soft reflection on what it would mean to ground national identity into land knowledge. Additionally, it underlines the importance of growing these national-specific cultural identities along with workers’ consciousness and necessities. From this situated consciousness, every worker can shift the paradigm of what it means to “work” and see themselves as actively producing society rather than mere servants of profit, along with societies of more than human agents.
\\
The exhibition and the accompanying program will run until 29 September.
- IMAGE CREDITS
Cover: Exhibition view, Biennale Matter of Art 2024 opening night, 13. 6. 2024, National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace © Jonáš Verešpej.
fig. 1: Performance of the Lada Choir, Biennale Matter of Art 2024 opening night, 13. 6. 2024, National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace © Jonáš Verešpej.
fig. 2: Pınar Öğrenci – Resisting Forest, 2019, exhibition view, Biennale Matter of Art 2024, National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace © Jonáš Verešpej.
fig. 3: Adelita Husni Bey – These Conditions, 2022–2023, Biennale Matter of Art 2024, exhibition view, National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace © Jonáš Verešpej.
fig. 4: Tomáš Uhnák with Asia Dér, Tamás Kaszás, Asunción Molinos Gordo, The Spectre of Peasantry, 2024, Biennale Matter of Art 2024, exhibition view, National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace © Jonáš Verešpej.
fig. 5: Asunción Molinos Gordo, El Fellah Ando Fes (The Peasant Has a Hoe), 2013, exhibition view, Biennale Matter of Art 2024, National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace © Jonáš Verešpej.
fig. 6: Alicja Rogalska – Flowers of Resilience, 2024, Biennale Matter of Art 2024, exhibition view, National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace © Jonáš Verešpej.
fig. 7: Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, The Invisible Hand of My Father, 2018, Biennale Matter of Art 2024, exhibition view, National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace © Jonáš Verešpej.
