Fall Symposium: The Question of Class: Art Labor and Class Erasure / 12 – 13 November 2026

Fall Symposium
12 – 13 November 2026
On-site and online
Auditorium D 1.04, Tower Building, HGK Basel FHNW
→ LIVESTREAM→ https://live.hgk.fhnw.ch/iagn-symposium

As part of the symposium series Gender and Equality in the Arts

With contributions by Sabian Baumann, Noa and Lara Castro Lema, Maurin Dietrich, Elisa Giardina Papa, Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei, Doreen Mende, Elke aus dem Moore, Amol K Patil, James Richards, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Latefa Wiersch, Angharad Williams, Sinthujan Varatharajah, and Tirdad Zolghadr

Moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer

The symposium is open to the public and will be held in English.
Free admission.

The question of class—within the art world, as without—is not to be spoken aloud. Labor and precarity, abstracted and theorized and individualized, yes, but structural inequality, poverty, and the destruction of the welfare state built by twentieth-century labor movements, no. This symposium at Institute Art Gender Nature considers the erasure of class in the contemporary art world and its markets, even as hierarchies of race, gender, geography—in which capital and labor are wildly entangled—are continually centered. The isolation of art workers into individual performers, the vilifying of migrant workers versus citizens, the structural fragmentation of freelance work, all make collective bargaining exigent. More questions, then: Who must work, and what is the effect of today’s technocratic accumulation of wealth? Is there a working-class aesthetics, in art as beyond it? What do we lose when the symbolic language of contemporary art becomes the language of the wealthy few? What are the real possibilities—for art, as for the world—of a new class consciousness? From symbolic wages and symbolic languages to material realities and artistic transformations, we will go. Join us.