The exhibition A Gestural History of the Young Worker came about as the outcome of a collaboration between the Amsterdam based Werker Collective and the Kyrgyzstani artist and activist Georgy Mamedov. The project was commissioned by the Residency Program of the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, and is currently on display at the Ural Optical-Mechanical Plant in Yekaterinburg, Russia. The two-part project consists of an installation and a publication and continues to explore the themes that have been in the focus of previous projects by both Werker Collective and Mamedov. Namely, the intersection of labour, class and economic oppression with gender, sexuality, queerness and bodily liberation.

According to the so called “gay propaganda” law, introduced in Russia in 2013 “for the purpose of protecting children from information advocating for a denial of traditional family values”, the project had to be displayed with an +18 age warning. However, despite these legal precautions, during the final stages of production, the Biennial’s organisers informed us that they found it inappropriate to depict male frontal nudity even for adult audiences, and suggested we remove six images from the installation and the Russian edition of the publication. After a long debate over this act of censorship, we decided to exhibit the project without altering the content but instead adding patches of black vinyl to cover those six images. To us the fact that a project combining labour and queerness, even in a censored version, could be seen in Yekaterinburg – where in August 2019, prior to the opening of the Biennial, the LGBT resource centre had to close its doors because of death threats – seemed to be a more relevant and acute political gesture than a withdrawal of the project from public display.

The irony of censorship in artistic practice is that these acts of restriction and prohibition become interwoven into the fabric of an artwork and inform its meaning in a new and unpredicted way. From the very beginning of our work on this project we were very well aware of its political implications, but this censorship episode sharpened the image of a potential synthesis of class struggle and the struggle against the heteronormative oppression of bodies. The censorship of this project by the Biennial officials shifted A Gestural History of the Young Worker from the realm of imaginative speculation into the realm of actual political confrontation, thus turning the political potentiality of the project into a localised and embodied political reality.

Werker Collective compiled images for this project during an art residency in the Urals—the Soviet industrial heartland—where the strong, athletic bodies of workers, with severe and determined faces and firm, coordinated gestures, were once celebrated in painting, sculpture, and photography. The Soviet visual glorification of the worker and labour rested upon the Marxist dialectical imperative to overcome alienation between different elements of social structure, especially the gap between physical and intellectual labour. In the early Soviet political vocabulary, the word Smychka indicated this drive towards collaboration and union in society. Soviet visual culture came up with different representations of smychka. During the industrialization of the 1920s and early 1930s, artists adopted a workers’ ethos of collectivity through organising artistic brigades that developed their artistic work on construction sites and factory floors. Soviet painting of the 1960s romanticized the idea of Smychka by visually blurring the boundaries between physical and intellectual labour. The worker was portrayed as a thinker.

Gestures are primary manifestations of bodies in social space, as they precede words in expressing desire, pain, excitement, fear, relaxation and anxiety. Gestural expression is especially relevant for marginalized and outcast bodies. Bodies whose capacity to speak is restricted, develop a vocabulary beyond the spoken word. Moving hips, a winking eye, a firm handshake, or a soft touch of shoulders, form the visual lexicon of resistance against the assimilation of queered bodies and their desires. Gestures live short lives, they are hard to document, they tend to disappear. Gestures are always circumstantial and open to interpretation. So is an attempt to reconstruct histories of the oppressed, the silenced, and the outcast. In this respect, publishing a visual history of gesture is a gesture in itself – playful and painful, horny and reserved, tender and aggressive, liberating and oppressive, clandestine and up-front. A Gestural History of the Young Worker is a montage of antinormative looks, moves, poses, smiles, and tears that stresses the dialectical character of the gesture of work which is often exploitative, enslaving, and abusive, yet which also contains the potential for becoming emancipatory.

Montage is a combination of two gestures; cutting and assembling. To cut off documents from their original context is a motion of communication that opens a space for seeking justice towards a past that was repressed. Disconnected and reassembled—according to the method of montage—these reworked documents do not only reveal hidden histories, they also shed light on possible futures. A futurity that is lurking in this selection of documents is not a blueprint of a new society. It reveals the mere possibility of it, as an ephemeral hint towards solidarity between all bodies in pain, their shared desire for bodily mutuality, and their collective struggle, and that of work as a creative, fulfilling, and cumulative process.

The mages and documents for this publication have been gathered collectively, from the margins of history. A variety of visual sources such as propaganda and glossy magazines, museum and library archives, grassroots documentary photography, and paraphernalia found in flea markets form its corpus. A six-meter high statue of a naked man breaking chains—a monument to liberated labour—erected in the central square of Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 1920 may still appear outrageous for its uncompromising physicality. Outrageous in different ways, but equally distressing, may be an image of two men cuddling, boys peeing on the street, or the frontal depiction of genitals from an ad for a male-to-male erotic phone line. 

However, it is not only full nudity and eroticism that can be perceived as unsettling. The Soviet photograph celebrating a young Mansi reindeer herder or a painting depicting workers on a factory floor looking at an easel, contrasted with the impoverished, degraded and decomposed bodies of labour migrants, plantation workers, and food delivery couriers in flashy uniforms, appear naïve, artificial, and untrustworthy. Workers are no longer heroes; queers have never been depicted as such. The critical and  futuristic proposal of our exhibition is: Workers are Queer. Throughout history, workers and queers have been pitted against each other. Right-wing regimes and politicians worldwide appeal to workers as a beacon of stability and tradition while depicting queers as a threat to traditional values. Opposing workers’ interests with the interests of LGBTQ+ and feminist movements has been a remarkable characteristic of the international Left as well. A Gestural History of the Young Worker, simultaneously inspired by emancipatory politics of the international labour movement and by the body liberationist politics of the radical queers and feminists, offers a new kind of smychka, that is a utopian synthesis of work and desire.