Book Launch and Panel Discussion
Reworking Labor

with Daniel Eisenberg, Dr. Felicitas Hentschke, Deanna Ledezma, Joshua Rios, Ellen Rothenberg, and Sonia Yoon

Wed, 10/25/2023
16:00 - 18:00 The LeRoy Neiman Center

Will there be enough work in the future?
What happens to essential workers during the next pandemic?
Will robots replace care workers?
What's required for a healthy work life, environment, and planet?

REWORKING LABOR explores the challenging new landscape of work and labor, with a panel discussion and conversation on issues of contemporary labor and new forms of creative collaboration.

Participants include Daniel Eisenberg, Dr. Felicitas Hentschke, Deanna Ledezma, Joshua Rios, Ellen Rothenberg, and Sonia Yoon.

REWORKING LABOR, the three-part curatorial research project - international symposium, exhibition, and publication - presented contemporary representations of work and labor, highlighted maintenance and care work, social reproduction, and the future forms of work. Coming shortly after the close of the exhibition at the SAIC Sullivan Galleries in December 2019, the transboundary Covid-19 crisis, affected and reconfigured all elements of our social system, forcing far-reaching reevaluations in our relation to work.  With this new book, the contributors take the crisis as a starting point, considering these changes and what they mean for a new generation.

The book launch of REWORKING LABOR is presented in partnership with the Goethe-Institut Chicago and with support from the SAIC Galleries, The Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice at SAIC, and the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

SPEAKERS

DANIEL EISENBERG has been making films and videos at the border between documentary and experimental media for over forty years. His films have screened throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas with solo exhibitions at MOMA, NYC, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, the American Museum of the Moving Image, NYC, the Musée du Cinema, Brussels; De Unie, Rotterdam; and Kino Arsenal, Berlin, among others. His films have shown in the Berlin Film Festival; the Sydney Film Festival; the London Film Festival; the Jerusalem Film Festival; The New York Film Festival, IDFA, FIDMarseille, The DMZ Documentary Film Festival Korea, and the Whitney Biennial, NY. Eisenberg received the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Guggenheim Fellowship; the D.A.A.D. Berliner Künstlerprogramm Fellowship, an Illinois Arts Council Media Arts Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, a Graham Foundation grant, and an NEA Fellowship. His recent film, The Unstable Object II, received the Grand Prix and the Prix Georges De Beauregard International at FIDMarseille, 2022. Eisenberg lives and works in Chicago and Berlin and is a Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was also a fellow at re:work, International Research Institute, Humboldt University, Berlin. As inaugural Faculty Research Fellow in the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice at SAIC he co-curated the international symposium and exhibition, RE:WORKING LABOR, 2018/2019.

FELICITAS HENTSCHKE is the Managing Director of the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies at Freie Universität Berlin. Previously, she was responsible for strategic planning at the International Office of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Until 2021, she worked at the International Research Centre re:work - Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She was a research associate at the German Historical Museum and later project leader of the interdisciplinary research group “Circulation of Knowledge: Transregional Studies” at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. She is co-editor of the book “To Be at Home. House, Work, and Self in the Modern World” (with James Williams, 2018) and “Corona Around the Globe” (with Andreas Eckert, 2020) as well as the book series “Arbeit global - Historische Rundgänge” (with Andreas Eckert, since 2016).

DEANNA LEDEZMA (PhD, Art History, University of Illinois Chicago) is a historian, writer, and educator specializing in the history and theory of photography and Latinx art and visual culture. She is the Postdoctoral Research Associate for the Inter-University Program for Latino Research/UIC Mellon Program and a Lecturer in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her book project The Fecundity of Family Photography: Histories, Identities, Archival Relations examines how the uses and ways of relating to photographs redefine and reframe what is regarded as a family photograph and what “counts” as family. Her articles have appeared in Art Journal and Photography & Culture. Walls Divide Press and Green Lantern Press have published her nonfiction essays based on her own family’s photographic collections. Forthcoming publications include the foreword to Diana Solís’s artist’s book Luz: Seeing the Space Between Us and “Dismantling Latinx Monoliths: Representations of Material Culture, Communities, and Kinship in 1980s Chicago” in The Routledge Handbook of American Material Culture Studies. During her graduate studies, she received the IUPLR/Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, Access to Excellence Fellowship, Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois Fellowship, and Chancellor’s Graduate Research Award.

JOSH RIOS is faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches courses in critical studies, social theory, and research-based practice. As a media artist, his projects engage the archives, political histories, and futurities of Latinx, Indigenous, and Chicanx subjectivities, especially understood through globalization and neocoloniality. Recent projects and presentations have been featured at the Vincent Price Art Museum, Locust Projects, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and as part of the civic exhibition, Counterpublic, as well as the symposium, Listening as a Shared and Social Practice at the University of Regina (SK). Recent publications appear in the exhibition catalog for Art for the Future: Artist Call and Central American Solidarities and in March: An International Journal of Art and Strategy. Recent residencies include Close to There (2020), an exchange program between Salvador (BR) and Chicago (US) and Re:place, a year-long residency supported by the Chicago Cultural Center (2020-21). Rios is a council member for the exhibition and programming space Co-Prosperity (Chicago) and a Visiting Artist Coordinator for the cooperatively run residency.

ELLEN ROTHENBERG’s installations and public projects are concerned with the politics of everyday life and the formation of communities through collaborative practices. Grounded in the knowledge of how images shape our understanding of current and historical events, Rothenberg’s work engages questions of citizenship and belonging, movements of resistance, invisible labor, and the future of work. Rothenberg’s projects have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; the Museum of London, Ontario; the Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen; Royal Festival Hall, London; the Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu, Romania; among others. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College, Harvard University; the Illinois Arts Council; the Massachusetts Artist Foundation; as well as grants from CEC Artslink, the Charles Engelhard Foundation, LEF Foundation, and NEA Artists Projects. As inaugural Faculty Research Fellow in the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice at SAIC she co-curated the international symposium and exhibition, RE:WORKING LABOR, 2018/2019. An Associate Fellow at re:work, International Research Institute, Humboldt University, Berlin in 2022-23, Rothenberg lives and works in Chicago and Berlin. She’s a Professor Adj. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

SONIA YOON is a designer, creative producer, and artist. Yoon partners with creators and cultural organizations to promote their vision through public programs, communication strategies, and projects online and in print—with a specialty in development and design of art publications. For RE:WORKING LABOR, Yoon partnered with curators Ellen Rothenberg and Daniel Eisenberg across the multi-year project to develop the program website, exhibition guide and culminating publication, REWORKING LABOR (2023: School of the Art Institute of Chicago). Recent publications include Jacolby Satterwhite: How lovly is me being as I am, the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s conceptual practice (2021: Miller Institute for Contemporary Art); An Impulse to Keep: Greenwood Art Project, catalogue for the 1921 Tulsa Massacre Centennial Commission programs (2021: NAME Publications); Karyn Olivier: Everything That’s Alive Moves, the artist’s first illustrated monograph (2021: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania), and Roger Brown: Virtual Still Lifes, major retrospective at the Museum of Arts and Design (2019: School of the Art Institute of Chicago). Since 2008, she has produced projects for the Green Lantern Press, Soberscove Press, Carnegie Mellon University, The University of Chicago, Hyde Park Jazz Festival and collaborated on numerous projects with artists William Cordova, Daniel Eisenberg, Theaster Gates, Magalie Guérin, Kirsten Leenaars, and Ellen Rothenberg. She is a co-founder of artist-run organization, Threewalls (2003–2006, Chicago), and holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.