At its Karlsplatz location, the Kunsthalle Wien’s exhibition Work it, feel it! is dedicated to the work of the future and the future of work. The exhibition focuses on the demands placed on the human body and its possibilities to act, as seen against the backdrop of an increasingly automated workplace. What are the mechanisms of discipline and control that have been applied to the mind, and above all to the body, to make it an efficient production tool and a pillar of consumerism?

Until the mid-20th century, within the disciplinary societies, “enclosed milieus” (“milieux clos”, e.g. schools, factories, clinics, etc.) served the formation of bodies, whereas today’s control societies aim to make bodies useful and teachable by means of information.

At the same time, new techniques are developing, which serve less to adapt the bodies for the production sector, but rather to train them – for the sake of physicality itself – to become ever more “perfect”, physically fit and (leisure-)consuming subjects. Which ideals are being pushed? And what happens to the bodies that resist and escape optimization?

Between utopia and dystopia, between speculation and analysis, the exhibition’s artists outline working environments of the future against the background of their economic and political instrumentalization.

Artists: Apparatus 22, Hannah Black, Danilo Correale, Juliette Goiffon / Charles Beauté, Louise Hervé / Chloé Maillet, Shawn Maximo, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Toni Schmale, Romana Schmalisch / Robert Schlicht, Visible Solutions