Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish Deconstructing the Performance of Labour in the Bureau of Melodramatic Research

Abstract

The advent of neoliberalism was accompanied by a substantial ideological and visual apparatus required to promote and legitimise the new forms of labour and mechanisms of power it generated. Concurrently, labour garnered significant attention from artists, particularly feminist artists, who started misappropriating the visual vocabulary of work as a means of political reclamation. This paper examines the practice of the artistic duo The Bureau of Melodramatic Research and the aesthetic strategies they implement to deconstruct the contemporary performance of labour and shed light on the distress, precarity and paradoxes of contemporary work.