Sobering, ‘Hard Graft’ Unpacks Issues of Exploitation and Well-Being in Work

Funded via a foundation established by nineteenth-century Big Pharma businessman Henry Wellcome, the Wellcome Collection’s exhibitions are all linked to health and well-being in one way or another.  Mr. Wellcome was also a collector, and his legacy includes a museum-sized archive of literature, imagery and objects related to social and medical health. The Wellcome Collection’s curators are given access to the archive and can choose bits and bobs to complement each exhibition’s themes. It’s not as dull as it sounds. The museum’s 2023 exhibition, “The Cult of Beauty”, dissected attitudes toward beauty, from the origins of the male gaze to the cosmetic industry cod-scientific manipulations. Show-stopping pieces from the likes of performance artist Narcissister and activist and artist Eszter Magyar’s Makeupbrutalism project were included alongside seventeenth-century vanitas artworks conveying the emptiness of pursuing beauty.

Next up, the Collection’s “Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights” exhibition sets its stall out early. As visitors walk into the space, a sign tells them the exhibition explores links between underrepresented work, the people who do it and where it takes place. Okay, then. Putting together an exhibition about something as big as work was never going to be easy, and the sign explains the survey’s focus. ”Hard Graft” is divided into three sections—The Plantation, The Street and The Home—with each one containing a mixture of artifacts from the Wellcome Collection’s archives and lent artwork chosen to cover the exhibition’s key tenets.

The Plantation section looks at the health of plantation workers, from sixteenth-century slaves to indigenous communities in China. Most pieces on display are linked to empirical evidence and are used to illustrate a point. Md Fazia Rabbi Fatiq’s photographs document work injuries suffered by contemporary Bangladeshi farm laborers, and Charmaine Watkiss’ ethereal drawings celebrate the herbal remedies passed down through the years by members of the African diaspora. Vivian Caccuri’s Mosquito Shrine is an embroidered mosquito net telling of how ships transporting slaves from Africa to Brazil in the 1500s also brought mosquitoes that spread malaria and yellow fever across the country. The 2021 film from environmental activists Forensic Architecture, If toxic air is a monument to slavery, how do we take it down? investigates Louisiana’s Death Alley oil refineries built on the area’s enslaved population’s graveyards.

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The Street covers sex workers, street vendors, sanitation workers and their attendant unregulated economy. There’s a lot to unpack in the first of the exhibition’s new commissions, Lindsey Mendick’s Money Makes the World Go Round. Created in collaboration with SWARM—the Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement—and Black non-binary author Mendez, the installation is built to look like an altar, complete with stained-glass windows. On a central screen, Mendez tells the story of a young Black rent boy working his way around London’s streets couched against themes of Biblical hypocrisy. The gaudily glazed clay money boxes on the pews in front of the altar represent the cash sex workers make, and SWARM’s involvement underlines their campaigning for rights and safety in the sex industry. The whole thing is both lovely and confusing. Perhaps easier to process, Mozambique-born Cassi Namoda’s Self Disgust in 100 Per Cent Humidity hangs quietly on the wall in front of it, a painting rammed with the afterburn of regret.

Forming part of The Home section (dedicated to unwaged domestic tasks and their emotional and physical impacts), the show’s second commission, Vietnamese artist Moi Tran’s Care Chains (Love Will Continue To Resonate), is a round room covered with grayscale photos of domestic workers’ hands. Created with the help of Voice of Domestic Workers, a London-based organization that works to empower migrant domestic workers in the U.K., film footage of the workers’ bodies moving in close-up is projected from above, down onto a round table in the center of the room. Visitors are encouraged to lay their hands on the table and feel the vibrations from the installation’s thrumming soundtrack. It’s rather like taking part in a gentle séance, as the workers’ frustrations and sadness are communicated through the room’s physical and sonic reverberations.

Shannon Alonzo’s Washerwoman sits next door. A headless body made from yellowed, varnished linen, wax and clothes pegs, the Trinidadian artist’s figure is the husk of a woman hollowed out by the drudgery of domestic labor. The pegs look like broken teeth eating themselves. A set of Lubaina Himid’s Metal Handkerchiefs paintings are lined up along the wall opposite, each one daubed with ambivalent-sounding health and safety messages. Nearby, Dr. Joyce Jiang and Tassia Kobylinska’s 2019 film, Our Journey, is heartbreaking. Both are also involved with the Voice of Domestic Workers, and their film shows women from Southeast Asia and Africa telling of their loneliness and the abuse they undergo at the hands of their British employers.

“Hard Graft” is a powerful, sobering survey, and the choice of archival material adds gravity to the themes explored. A notebook page with the handwritten lyrics of an eighteenth-century African chant aimed at telling a slave owner of the despair his field workers were suffering is deeply moving. However, given the exhibition’s stated targets of exploitation and well-being in work, the lack of anything explicit about the kafala system of modern slavery used by a number of Middle Eastern countries feels like a missed opportunity. In April this year, the Guardian interviewed fifty female domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Jordan to show how the system of kafala continues to abuse migrant workforces. If the photographs of migrant workers sweeping streets in the UAE exhibited here (taken by Dubai-based artist Vikram Divecha) are intended to represent the living hell of kafala, their effect is way too subtle. Especially as, quite rightly, no punches are pulled elsewhere.

“Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights” is on view at the Wellcome Collection in London through April 27, 2025. Admission is free.