On the occasion of their
participation in
Ten Thousand Suns, the 24th edition of the
Biennale of Sydney, April’s Cover Story spotlights
Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum, and
The Margins of the Factory, the
exhibition of the duo’s work that Latitudes curated in 2014.
At
ADN Platform, one of two projects showcased was
Work in Progress (2013), which delved into the manufacturing industry of Markina-Xemein, Iratxe’s rural Basque hometown. A video documented the mass production of rubber car parts, tracing the journey from the assembly line of a worker-owned factory to makeshift workspaces where informal workers, including women from Moldova, Peru, and Senegal, finished pieces by hand.
The artists employed several of these workers to cast hundreds of replicas of small modernist sculptures. These replicas were then displayed on mass-produced shelving, aiming to evoke the
Laboratorio de tizas (Chalk Laboratory) (c. 1972–74) by Jorge Oteiza, the Basque sculptor known for his strong criticism of the commodification of art.
“We have a long-standing interest in the image of ‘work’, and in the relation between art and labour”, the artists explained in a 2013
Frieze interview with Latitudes’ Max Andrews. And turning Oteiza’s experimental sculpture laboratory into a contemporary production line “allowed us to stage an image of the artist at work, and to superimpose it onto that of the wage-worker, ultimately presenting both as ideologically loaded social constructions.”
In 2018
Work in Progress was
acquired by the
collection of
Artium Museoa, the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country.
In Sydney, Iratxe & Klaas are
showing a new rendition of
False Flag (2021), their series of sculptures that draw inspiration from René Magritte’s surrealist warplanes of 1937 and the legacy of the Guernica bombardment. The
Biennale runs until 10 June 2024.