Isabella Fürnkäs presents a dystopian techno-economic future where there is no space for human language or human labour. Fürnkäs’ video installation In Ekklesia (2015) offers a speculative vision of labour in the era of robotics. A projection screen, resting on a pile of kinetic sand, depicts industrial machines at work. Footage of different industrial machines and robots is interspersed with images of ballpoint pen drawings by Fürnkäs, as well as documentation of rave culture. The mix of industrial imagery and party culture echo each other as the robotic movements seemingly move in time with the technoid sounds.

The growing automatisation of unskilled labour leads to a rise in unemployment and work precarity. What started as the Fordist dream of a growing economy turned into a nightmare. Today, job insecurity, worklessness and financial instability preoccupy a generation of anxious and disassociated workers. Fürnkäs grasps the discrepancy between intimacy and productivity, labour and leisure, between euphoria and anxiety by layering image, sound and lyric in this moving image installation. The fast images are interspersed by moments of stasis and dreariness.

“I am so sad” “I am transparent” “I am losing my language”

The loss of language the vocalist refers to here, invokes a loss of power and control. The kinetic sand, framing the projection screen, suggests the quicksand-like quality of a system that once it grabs you, won’t let go. As Mark Fisher wrote, capitalism is “a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolising and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.”

In Unpredictable liars (2018) mysterious veiled figures linger in the exhibition space; they could be from past decades or maybe the distant future. Mumbling under their cloak, they tell the story of The Raft of the Medusa, an oratorio by the German composer Hans Werner Henze, the tale of the French frigate Meduse, which ran aground off the west coast of Africa in 1816. Some castaways saved themselves on a raft, but in the end only fifteen of the hundred and fifty mariners survived.

Translated through sculpture, a story of desperation, existential crisis and cannibalism unfolds. While Hans Werner Henze’s oratorio originated against the backdrop of left-wing thought in the 1960s, Fürnkäs’ work situates itself very specifically in the context of contemporary economics, referencing isolation and the struggle for survival.