Recently, a new experimental curatorial and exhibition project was presented at Galeria Aparte (UNAGE Iași, Romania). The curator noted that this project, titled Outsourced Practices II – Endless Extractions, was never about how it looked. It refused the comfort of the finished object and—deliberately—avoided the seduction of the image altogether.

As curator Cristian Nae explains, it was “about process, the aesthetics of precarity, the production of affects and ideas,” often unfolding in ways that were invisible, understated, or indistinguishable from the mundane gestures of everyday life. What emerged was a curatorial experiment in which artistic labour—its rhythms, frictions, and hesitations—became both medium and message.

Within this experimental framework, each artist contributed a gesture that destabilised the conventions of exhibition-making. Tudor Pătrașcu quite literally “drew in time,” transforming duration itself into artistic material. Dan Acosti extended the narrative of a TikTok character he had previously developed—a persona critiquing influencer cultures that instrumentalise spirituality and religion for symbolic capital. Oana Nae turned domestic labour into performance, repeatedly washing and rewriting the gallery floor in a Sisyphean loop of repetitive effort. Andrei Timofte made his presence audible through the continuous saving of digital files, turning a bureaucratic gesture of the digital workspace into a kind of ambient drone. Meanwhile, Savin Aureliu Mihai, in a vulnerable surrender to process, slept overnight in the gallery as a 3D printer generated the sculptural image of his resting body. “Crazy artist,” Nae remarks with affectionate irony. “And what can I say about that oblique reference to Tracey Emin?”

Beyond these actions, the project is anchored in a broader theoretical landscape informed by recent post-Marxist thought. In an economy shaped by what McKenzie Wark calls the vectoralist class—those who control the infrastructures of data, attention, and cultural mediation—artistic labour no longer produces objects. Instead, it generates affects, visibility, and circulation. The artist becomes simultaneously producer and product, worker and brand, caught in a metabolic cycle in which attention is commodified and creativity becomes a resource to be harvested.

As Nae’s curatorial text argues, “artistic labour, although seemingly immaterial, involves a profound form of alienation,” precisely because its value is detached from its material outcome. Rather, value arises from circulation within symbolic and economic networks. In this context, the precarious artist—freelancer, cultural worker, content generator—embodies a new, refined proletarianization masked by the rhetoric of autonomy and passion. Precarity—underpaid, unpaid, fragmented—reveals the extraction mechanisms of techno-capitalism, in which affect, free time, and performativity all become exploitable resources.

The exhibition functions as a diagram of these invisible forms of work. The 3D-printed sculpture, the installations documenting repetitive or domestic labour, and the performances that mimic the gestures of daily routine or online content production each serve as diagnostic tools. They bring into tension manual and automated labour, domestic and intellectual work, what is materially visible and what is systematically obscured.

The curatorial framework draws on Helen Hester’s critique of how productivity colonises leisure time, Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s analyses of affective exhaustion, and Hito Steyerl’s notion of the “circulating capital of the image.” These references position the exhibition as a critical cartography of labour in its post-industrial expansion.

Here, the artistic gesture becomes an act of temporal and epistemic resistance: an effort to reconceptualise work not as obligation, but as a practice of making visible what contemporary symbolic economies prefer to keep hidden. Ultimately, the exhibition proposes that the unfinished, the fragile, the repetitive, and the invisible are not failures of artistic production, but essential tools for understanding how work—and life—are shaped today.

Photo credits: Galeria Aparte