A shift may end with the punch of a clock, but its impact does not—Around the Clock: The Factory Effect explores how the workplace leaves its mark long after hours. The industrial space of the former Pragovka factory serves not only as a mere backdrop for the exhibition, but moreover, as a spatial starting point for exploring the impacts of industrial workplaces on our bodies and the environment. The artworks by Ana de Almeida, Polina Davydenko, Sáro Gottstein, Martins Kohout, Jelena Micić, Alicja Rogalska, Kateřina Šedá, Forensic Architecture, and Anna Witt stimulate these reflections, while each contribution acts as a prism refracting the complex issue and steering it in specific directions.
Initiating a change of pace and encouraging us to slow down, the sound of Anna Witt’s
Unboxing the Future fills the exhibition space. Set in Toyota City—a place built around, and named after, the factory—the work brings together blue and white-collar workers to imagine a future without labor. Through a collectively developed choreography, line workers slow down their repetitive movements, unlearning speed and efficiency, and in a reversal of roles, begin teaching these to the engineers. In doing so, they challenge established hierarchies of workplace behavior. Witt draws attention to how our bodies, identities, and even our sense of free time are shaped by labor and capital, while searching for a moment of rupture.
Opening the exhibition space to broader ecologies, Jelena Micić’s Red Analysis exposes the other side of industrial production—its impact on nature, public health, and the communities living nearby. Red industrial dust becomes a record of pollution, environmental harm, and the limits of accountability, while also reflecting a deeper dependency on the very system that produces it. As the exhibition unfolds in space, it also unfolds in time—taking us to the lived reality of around the clock production.
Martins Kohout’s About Night Shifts explores how shift work reshapes lives and
relationships, drawing attention to the social costs of working against the body’s natural rhythm.
Further unfolding the social consequences of factories on community life is Kateřina Šedá’s socially engaged project Nedá se svítit. The fractured sense of community—marked by a feeling of resignation—that followed the construction of a Hyundai car plant in the Czech village of Nošovice is the focus of her long-term collaboration with the local residents. On embroidered headscarves, Šedá uses the circular outline of the factory’s premises—traced on a map—as both a symbol and a method, transforming local memories into embroidered drawings. Through this process, she facilitates a slow, collective reclaiming of identity—where shared experience becomes both an archive and an act of resistance
Offering a historical lens on industrial impacts, Ana de Almeida’s spatial installation Fat
History inspects how one factory has transformed both the city environment and the daily
realities of workers. By embedding archival fragments, debris, and the very fats used in the factory’s production into handmade soaps, de Almeida creates an intimate archive, materially preserving the intertwined histories of industry, urban transformation, and everyday life.
Soap, as a binding material, also appears in Sáro Gottstein’s sculpture Nového 1194, where it draws attention to invisible labor in both domestic and industrial settings. In their work, Gottstein appropriates vacuum-packed, industrially washed bed linens, disrupting factory-efficient processing by slowly dissolving the soap and allowing it to dry in the sun. The intervention highlights how repetitive tasks—whether performed at home or within institutional frameworks—often remain undervalued and taken for granted.
Polina Davydenko’s Public Tinnitus turns to a different kind of overlooked reality: how the
effects of labor are inscribed in the body. Set in Dobropillia in eastern Ukraine, the work reflects on the relentless noise of coal mining—a form of sonic pollution so constant that people stopped noticing it. What once intruded becomes a steady hum, no longer consciously heard by locals, yet never truly absent. Only those arriving from outside still hear it. At the same time, Davydenko draws a parallel between the mining town and a beehive—where natural resources are replaced, sugar for honey, money for coal. Sugar for honey, money for coal—each a cheap replacement fuelling the system of labour. Since the Russian invasion, Polina`s father has fled Dobropilia, the beehive is dead, and only a few mine fans still run—most have already gone silent as the front line draws closer.
Around the Clock turns its focus to what is irreversible—to lives lost not by accident, but
due to systems in which death becomes collateral to an increase in profit, production, and power. Forensic Architecture’s investigation into the 2012 Ali Enterprises factory fire in Karachi reveals how global supply chains—and the demand for cheap products—are sustained by systemic indifference and disregard for life, embedded within global inequality. The fire, which claimed the lives of 259 factory employees, has been the subject of ongoing legal proceedings. Through spatial analysis, digital modeling, and survivor testimony, the collective Forensic Architecture builds evidence to challenge dominant narratives—supporting civil action not only in the courtroom, but also in public forums, such as the exhibition itself.
From loss to remembrance, the exhibition turns to those rarely given a place in public
memory. Alicja Rogalska’s Monument to Precarious Workers expands across the gallery wall. The photograph captures a moment from a performance: five workers frozen for hours in poses emblematic of their professions. The monument appeared briefly in a popular park in a Polish spa town—drawing attention, then vanishing—much like the lives and struggles of its protagonists: precarious workers. In the context of the violence, displacement, and systemic neglect traced throughout the exhibition, Rogalska’s work becomes a call—to make space for those often excluded from history’s monuments, to refuse forgetting and to notice what is so often deliberately overlooked.
At the end, Around the Clock: The Factory Effect seeks to provoke a critical awareness of
how our everyday actions shape the ecosystems we inhabit. At the same time, it aims to inspire viewers not to remain passive observers of history but to recognize themselves as active participants in shaping change. Through the diverse approaches of the participating artists, it becomes evident that each of us holds the potential to contribute to the transformation of the world around us.
