04/06/2026
.social.club 2026 we will exhibit present an installation by Shamiran Istifan addressing absurdist expectations regarding modern work and workers. Her new piece will approach the current version of the corporate office and its embedded value systems, wherein one must increasingly perform devotion, compliance, and selflessness, all tracked and evaluated in order to assign worth to a working person, both within The Company’s hierarchy and beyond. One must assign omnipotence to the tenets of late-stage capitalism. You must ‘be’ your job, in doing so declaring your destiny. Money = success and non-compliance = destitution. Such an extreme relationship evokes the zero-sum attitudes of certain monotheistic religions, wherein you can again choose only one way to relate: devotion begetting eternal ecstasy; ambivalence begetting hellish misery. All of these demands are undergirded by a rainbow of timekeeping and pace-measuring devices.
The works’ aesthetics are couched in productivity surveillance. She will combine the aesthetic languages of the ancient religions and digitized workplaces in an attempt to materialize modern workers’ anxieties. Both can trap people in circular procedural frameworks wherein worth must be demonstrated regularly to avoid grave consequences. God and AI are watching, measuring your behavior down to the second.
* Istifan covering Feine Art issue, May 2026
