Kay Abude is an artist based in Melbourne, Australia. She has an expanded sculptural practice working in large-scale installation, photography, performance, video and silk screen printing. Abude’s work is about work itself: the value of it, the effort, the inequality and insecurity of it, especially for artists. Her recent commissions include BE CREATIVE REMAIN RESILIENT, Mural Commission, The Showroom, London, United Kingdom, 2023-24; Smoko Room, Paul Selzer Prize, Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery, Southbank, 2023; (DON’T) BE AN ARTIST, Flash Forward – Creative Laneways Project, The Hotel Windsor, Melbourne, 2021; NEVER WORK/ STOP WORKING, NGV Triennial EXTRA, NGV International, Melbourne, 2021; and WORK WORTH DOING, La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo, Victoria, 2020-21. Abude was a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne from 2019 to 2022.
Kay Abude
Smoko room
2023
Performance and installation presented as part of the Selzer Prize 2023 at the Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery, 29 June – 22 July 2023
Dimensions variable
Artist statement
It’s break time for the workers of CARGO XXV - LABOUR SOLUTIONS, a crew of 10 working for a fictional shipping company. They have paused from discharging cargo from a vessel to have a well-earned rest in the company’s smoko room – a place where conversation knows no limits and everyone has an opinion. But there isn’t anything fictional about the jobs these workers really do; stevedores for whom the smoko room is a safe haven from their high-risk labour at the docks in Melbourne.
This piece continues my work exploring work itself: the value of it, the effort, the inequality and insecurity of it, especially for artists. These performers are my colleagues, and the smoko room is one that I have sat in many times before. Since February 2022, after leaving the precarity of sessional teaching in the university sector, I have worked as a stevedore to support my art practice.
The wharf is unlike any workplace I have experienced – it is a high-risk environment where the workers openly and constantly challenge management, because it’s our lives at risk on a daily basis. It’s always us against them; where 24/7 shift work is all consuming; where there is boat after boat or none at all; where profanities and verbal abuse are the only form of communication; where, in a strange and shocking way, bullying is a form of endearment; where gossip spreads like wildfire and where women make up less than 12% of the entire workforce.
Smoko room celebrates all of this: the nature of individual work and collective labour, the sometimes cruel dynamics of a team and the rarely-seen bodies that economies rely on to keep pushing ever-forward. It blurs boundaries, presenting life as art, and art as life through a performance by a real and skilled waterfront workforce – wharfies who are being remunerated for their time at their designated rate, and whose pay levels reflect their position on the labour placement sheet. There may be a hierarchy at the docks but in the smoko room, we are altogether.
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Kay Abude would like to thank the following people for their involvement and support in her project: Flick Szmagaj, Gregory Stanley, Robbie Zidarich, Campbell Dwyer, Matty Waymouth, James Horo, Dylan Aquilina, Benny Pepa, Ersin Selek, Rob Smith, Shannon Smith, Marco Rinaldi, Dewi Cooke, Joon Youn, David Sequeira, Mia Salsjö and Anthony Frazzetto.
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