Lead Artist: Lily Potger
Sound Collaborator: Conor Mcdonald
This single-channel video work, accompanied by two mirrored stills, navigates the terrain of female and gender-diverse labour through the lens of physical absurdity. The artist stages a body in tension—caught between exertion and collapse—drawing from the visual and material language of patriarchal industry: construction winches, hard metal, and the soft, resisting flesh. Here, tools of trade become instruments of ritual, and the body a site of both burden and resilience.
Rooted in the artist’s lived experience within the flesh economies of dance and sex work—industries precariously tethered to the whims of wealth, desire, and corporate laundering—the work dwells in a structure that is both physical and metaphorical. Within this space, the artist enacts cycles of tightening and release, strength and submission, exposing the absurd mechanics of power that govern who labours, who profits, and who watches.
The performance unfolds as a kind of quiet resistance: a choreography of struggle that parodies the grind of survival under capitalism. Through repetitive, near-satirical action, the artist confronts the elitist, ableist, and fetishistic gazes that frame their ‘work’, offering not resolution but ritual—a gesture of internal unravelling, a shedding.
From a distance—the safe distance of the lens—the spectator witnesses this paradox. The body strives toward comfort through discomfort, dignity through exertion, absurdity through meaning. This is labour made visible, vulnerable, and strange. A body caught in the loop of spectacle and survival, never quite arriving, but always enduring.