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Hints to Workmen - An exhibition about what solidarity means in the 21st century

Robinson’s curatorial project Hints to Workmen at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art was an investigation into how artists have addressed the issue of ‘imagining solidarity’ in the 21st Century. The question implicitly has two facets. First: how artists can successfully work in an ethnographic manner, adequately documenting new social movements. The second is what agency they can exert in giving shape to what can be described as contingent micro-societies or groups that run against the grain of their own social formation, or against the dominant ideology. The exhibition included major loans and the UK premieres of new works from international artists Harun Farocki (Berlin), Peter Watkins (France), Gailan Abdullah Ismail (Erbil, Iraq), Rainer Ganahl (New York), Vinca Petersen (Kent), Stuffit (Bristol), Anna McCarthy (Munich), Baptiste Debombourg (Paris), Keetra Dean Dixon (New York), Robin Bhattacharya (Zurich). It also included new work by photographer Vinca Petersen (represented in the V&A) and The Open Council. The exhibition also included archival images from wider visual culture – specifically a specially curated section on banks’ advertising created during the Great Depression.

The exhibition was the first in the UK to: cross-compare artists’ representations of social solidarity across a broad geographical canvas and across media; analyse representations of oppositional or fictional or factional movements with those created for the financial sector in their own image at previous key historical junctures that parallel the present. The curatorial strategy required the audience to ask questions about the orthodox relationships between artistic value and political efficacy, and the contradictions of pursuing strategies of collaboration in a field in which forging an individual artistic identity is paramount, professionally.

The exhibition was seen by over 8,500 people over four months, being extensively reviewed in leading journals including Art Monthly as well as receiving coverage in national press including The Guardian.