Ali Bramwell: Attachment Drawing: Promise of Work

We are taught that work is a good thing. That it strengthens our character and our spirit. That we should be pleased and grateful when someone offers us the chance to work at all even if it is in return for a pittance. For an artist the idea is exaggerated further, because of the strange expectation in our society that artists will experience both satisfaction and nobility by working for nothing at all. To work at all should be enough, this is how we are taught to find a core moral value. So there is no shortage of work offered to artists, but the offer always comes with the assumption that a promise can be broken when metaphysical value of work hits the concrete expected value. What, then, does it mean to speak of promised work?

This exhibition project Promise of Work seeks to examine the promise that we have been made; that working, for its own sake, will fulfil and enoble us. Part of this examination includes the banal, repetitive, but inescapably necessary reality of temporary and unskilled jobs such as cleaning and factory work that millions of people, including many artists, undertake daily in a void of broken promises.

Ali Bramwell (born Auckland, New Zealand, 1969) is an academically trained sculptor and performance artist using kinetic installations trough physical strains of her body.  Bramwell’s installations – part of a series of art projects collectively called Attachment Drawings – often incorporate the possibility of exploitation, impermanence, absurdity and failure.

Since 2000 Bramwell has also been working as an independent curator. In 2011 she won a selectors’ merit award at New Zealand’s most prestigious biannual sculptural exhibition, Sculpture of the Gulf, in Auckland. As a project manager, artist and member of the international art collective Nine Dragon Heads, she co-organised Jump Into Unknown, a group exhibition and official collateral event at the 2015 Venice Biennale, and Taste of Tea a parallel event in the 2017 Istanbul Biennale. Bramwell has created a number of public installations including: Schema, Chiemsee Art, 2005; Etwas verloren, Subdokumenta, Sarajevo, 2009; Propositional Architecture, Artisterium, Tbilisi, 2010; and Attachment Drawing, Quartair Contemporary Art Initiatives, The Hague, 2011.