Simon Farid: solo residency, site-specific artwork: Institutions Are Just Groups of Workers, Arranged /
part of We’re Not Like Them
24.9.-6.10.2019
MMSU / Krešimirova 26c, 51000 Rijeka

Simon Farid – solo residency within large-scale exhibition We’re Not Like Them (2019), site-specific artwork Institutions Are Just Groups of Workers, Arranged)

Simon Farid was at the solo residency in Rijeka organized as a part of the large-scale exhibition ‘We’re Not Like Them’. The residential stay in Rijeka lasted from 24 September until 6 October 2019.

Farid is interested in the background process of gallery practice, which is rarely thematized and shown on exhibitions. He investigates the relationships between “higher” and “lower” positions, for example, the director vs. other workers, curators vs. cleaners and guards. Farid draws from his own experience as a guard in one of London’s art galleries.
The guards in London’s galleries are often artists who aspire to move on from being the guards to something that is being guarded, says Farid who, with his fellow artists-guards, collaborates in Invigilator Research Network. The network engages in the rights of workers, art ethics and the art world hierarchies. In Farid’s new work, the visibility of certain occupations, the management of free time, passive and active relationships to artist and the
audience, are the categories he uses to analyze the differences in the status of MMSU’s employees. The results of his investigation are presented in the form of text on the wall, text that normally serves as description of artwork or exhibition topic but this time point to hidden, often bizarre hierarchies in museum practice.