Routine and sometimes invisible, labour is happening everywhere at every moment of the day. Carers, writers, cleaners, artists, computer programmers, taxi drivers, mothers, and strikers; hidden or in plain sight everyone works but where and how is this labour seen?

Inspired by Labour in a Single Shot, a documentary video workshop initiated by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki that has occurred in 15 cities worldwide since 2011, artists and filmmakers Gair Dunlop and Pernille Spence will lead a practical video making workshop inviting participants to make a two-minute film that considers perceptions, practices and conditions of labour in our day-to-day life.

The workshop at Cooper Gallery is devised in close conversation with Antje Ehmann.
 

Participant information

 “The task at hand is to present the topic ‘work/labour’ by means of a single video shot; in other words, [participants] will produce videos consisting of only one shot. The topic is work; paid, unpaid, material or immaterial, traditional or entirely new. This assignment formally introduces the foundations of filming, given that [participants] need to find out: When can a beginning and even an end be found if a repetitive process is being shown? Should the camera be moved or stand still? What is the best way to capture the choreography of a work process in a single sequence? Early films told us: Every detail of the mobile world is worth being documented and considered. And they had a fixed point of view, whereas today’s documentary film only too often presents sequence upon sequence because it is undecided.” (Harun Farocki / Antje Ehmann) 

The workshop will begin with discussions on the participants’ ideas of a specific type of labour/work to be filmed, the manner of filming in a single shot, the protagonist and location, followed by a hands-on exercise of filming in a single shot.

The participants will be invited to independently make their films after the workshop and submit their Labour in a Single Shot film to be part of a screening event at the end of March 2023. 

Eligibility

This free workshop is open to anyone over 17 years old with any level of experience of working with video using camcorders or phone cameras.

Equipment

Participants are required to bring their own video recorder. This could be a mobile phone camera. 

Sign-up

Sign-up to participate via Eventbrite.

A screening of artist Rehana Zaman’s film Some Women Other Women and all the Bittermen (2014) within the context of the exhibition Harun Farocki: Consider Labour at Cooper Gallery and as part of the city-wide event Dundee Women's Festival. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with artist Rehana Zaman and Marissa Begonia a Founding Member and Director of The Voice of Domestic Workers.

Some Women Other Women and all the Bittermen combines ‘Bittermen’, a six-part fictional soap opera on the takeover of Tetley’s Brewery during the early 1990s, with footage documenting the meetings of Justice for Domestic Workers Leeds over the course of 2014 as they began to organise around restrictions to their employment rights within UK immigration laws. The film developed over a two-year period involving research interviews with ex Tetley’s Brewery workers and a tentative collaboration with migrant women workers from J4DW (currently The Voices of Domestic Workers). Although at a temporal, political, and cultural remove from one another the stories of these two groups are framed by common concerns relating to sites of labour and working class identity as framed through gender and race.

Schedule

Doors open: 6.15pm

Intro: 6.30pm
Sophia Yadong Hao & Rehana Zaman

Screening: 6.45–7.35pm
Some Women Other Women and all the Bittermen (49mins)

Q&A: 7.35–8.15pm
Rehana Zaman and Marissa Begonia

Doors close: 8.30pm

Booking

The screening event is free and open to all. Book a ticket via Eventbrite. 

Biographies

Marissa Begonia is a Founding Member and Director of The Voice of Domestic Workers. The Voice of Domestic Workers (formerly known as Justice For Domestic Workers) is an education and support group calling for justice, rights and welfare for Britain’s sixteen thousand migrant domestic workers. They provide educational and community activities for domestic workers - including English language lessons, drama and art classes, and employment advice, and provide support for domestic workers who exit from abusive employers. They empower migrant domestic workers to stand up and voice their opposition to any discrimination, inequality, slavery and all forms of abuse. 

She is a Unite the Union Representative for Migrant Domestic Workers, the biggest Trade Union in the UK and is in the process of forming the Domestic Workers Branch in Unite.

Rehana Zaman (b. Heckmondwike) is an artist based in London. Her work speaks to notions of kinship and sociality, seeking out possibilities of intimacy and transgression within hostile contexts. Conversation and cooperative methods sit at the heart of her films which extend into texts, performances and group work.

She has exhibited widely in the UK and Internationally. Recent presentations include Serpentine Projects (forthcoming), BEK - Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts, British Art Show 9 (Touring), ICA Miami, Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Borås International Sculpture Biennial (Sweden), Artist Film International Whitechapel, London and worldwide. In 2019 she co-edited Tongues with Taylor Le Melle, published by PSS and was shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award. She is a member of not/nowhere artist workers cooperative and her films are distributed by LUX.