Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights at the Wellcome Collection

In September 2024, Wellcome Collection will present Hard Graft, a free major exhibition exploring experiences of physical work and its impacts on health and the body. Making connections between undervalued labour, the people who do it and the spaces where it happens, this exhibition brings into focus the people whose health, work and rights remain hidden on the margins of society.

Hard Graft will centre on three places of work: The Plantation, The Street and The Domestic Space, each a distinct location for, often hard, physical labour, where conditions may be precarious or unsafe, and workers have little or no access to healthcare, a stable income or basic rights. From sex work to street vending, and domestic work to prison labour, the exhibition will highlight how unregulated and stigmatised work practices have reinforced healthcare inequalities throughout history, and continue to do so today.

Featuring more than 100 objects, with artworks from Brazil, Bangladesh, Trinidad, Sudan, Peru, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico and the USA, to name a few, the exhibition will draw upon the interconnections of working practices across different geographies. Contemporary and historic accounts will highlight the histories of resistance and the power of collective action by workers in response to their working conditions – from organised protest to spiritual and medicinal healing practices.

The exhibition will feature artworks by contemporary artists including Turner prize-winner Lubaina Himid, Adelita Husni-Bey, Charmaine Watkiss, Vivian Cacurri, Forensic Architecture, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Shannon Alonzo, Daniela Ortiz, as well as new commissions by Lindsey Mendick and Moi Tran.

Objects from Wellcome’s collection will include Histoire générale des insectes de Surinam et de toute l’Europe (1771), a publication by the pioneering naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, whose research on plants was heavily influenced by enslaved women from a sugar plantation in Suriname, and Street Life in London (1877), by John Thomson and Adolphe Smith, a rare collection of photographs that brought public attention to the precarious labour conditions of working-class Londoners and considered to be one of the earliest examples of social documentary photography.

An introductory section will present Adelita Husni-Bey’s Gestures of Labour (2009), a film that documents the hand gestures of migrant workers as they move in a rhythmic repetition, marking out the body as the predominant machinery in the production of everyday objects. Photographs from the Bouba Touré Archive will celebrate workers and migrants’ movements protesting for national workers’ rights and better working conditions in Paris since the 1990s. Nearby images will depict the experiences of the ‘Windrush generation’, the thousands of people who immigrated from Commonwealth Caribbean countries to address post-war labour shortages and rebuild Britain’s economy. They, and their families, made key contributions to Britain’s infrastructure, such as the National Health Service, yet their rights were severely impacted by the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, and continue to be to this day.

The first section of the exhibition will focus on The Plantation. These large-scale expanses of land, centred on exploitative agricultural work, are economic systems of mass production and an early form of capitalist practice that still exists today. It will highlight common health impacts faced by plantation workers, including poor body development, malnutrition and disease, emphasising the need for more equitable and suitable practices. A 19th century lithograph reveals the power dynamics of how work was performed in tea plantations in China, and will be shown with the photographic series, Dark Garden (2022-ongoing), by Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq who has documented tea plantation work in Sylhet, Bangladesh since 2018. Charmaine Watkiss’ multi-media installation will celebrate the ancestral intergenerational traditions of herbal medicine, used to secretly cure illnesses and prevent diseases as an act of resistance in plantations – knowledge that is still preserved by the broader African diaspora today. Nearby, Forensic Architecture’s film, Environmental Racism in Death Alley, Louisiana (2021), addresses the health of local populations living on former plantation land in the Southern States of America, with many sites now occupied by mass-polluting industrial facilities.

The Street, the second section in the exhibition, will explore a place where workers are often unprotected by labour laws and at the hands of increasing urban developments and gentrification. This section will focus on unregulated labour and jobs that can be dangerous, including sanitation workers, waste pickers and sex workers. Highlights will include works by Vikram Divecha, Ernest C. Withers and Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) in collaboration with Creatura, emphasising the challenging and often hazardous conditions faced by sanitation workers who are often exposed to pollution and toxic materials. Archives from the English Collective of Prostitutes and the SWARM Collective will depict significant moments in the fight to decriminalise and destigmatise sex work as they try to achieve improved safety while at work, a regulated income and greater access to healthcare services. Photographs, posters and ephemera will be shown alongside a new commission by artist Lindsey Mendick, in collaboration with members of the SWARM collective, which will tell forgotten and untold stories of sex workers within an intricate multimedia installation.

Hard Graft will close with The Domestic Space, interrogating the notion of the home as a workplace. Bringing together archival materials with contemporary artworks, the section will examine gendered practices of work, focussing on the roles that have been constructed by society for women. The Domestic Space will also look at unwaged, low paid and unrecognised labour, such as cleaning work and domestic work, mostly performed by migrant women and often leading to exploitative working and living conditions behind closed doors. It will spotlight some of the collective movements that have campaigned for better working conditions and greater recognition of women’s health issues in the workplace. Highlights will include a print by Louise Bourgeois from the Femme Maison (1984) series, connecting to women’s relationships with the domestic sphere, suggesting it as both an oppressive and exposing environment, and Lubaina Himid’s vibrant series Metal Handkerchief (2019), which playfully decontextualises the language of British health and safety manuals, repositioning them as instructions for life. Also in this section, Shannon Alonzo’s sculpture, Washerwoman (2018), pays homage to the heritage of her ancestors’ labour in Trinidad and the Caribbean, in particular the historically underrepresented labour-intensive work of women and how it impacts the body.

The final work, and second new commission within the exhibition, will be a multimedia installation by artist Moi Tran, made in collaboration with the UK-based organisation The Voice of Domestic Workers. The installation will demonstrate the power of collective clapping, sound, movement and vibrations as resistance, release and joy. The work will acknowledge the labour of domestic workers, whose hands are central to their work, as well as a tool for the love and care that connects and heals us.

Hard Graft is a free exhibition exploring the experiences and histories of underrepresented work and labour, and its profound impact on health and workers’ rights. It is curated by Cindy Sissokho and will be open to the public from 19 September 2024 to 27 April 2025. Historic works in the exhibition will be drawn from Wellcome Collection, the V&A, Bishopsgate Institute and the National Archives.