TORUN.- To celebrate its institutional opening as Poland´s first newly erected venue dedicated to contemporary art since 1939, the Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Torun invited Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary to present works from the foundation´s collection as part of the inauguration exhibition.

The selection of artworks drawn from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation (T-B A21) explores the question of artistic representation of today´s ever more precarious work spheres within advanced economies. The dramatic but also multi-voiced .work histories., as narrated or presented by Julian Rosefeldt, Allan Sekula, Los Carpinteros, Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkácová and Andreas Siekmann result from radical shifts in production and work processes, such as the outsourcing of services to migrant workers, often .sans papiers., and from larger social restratifications reflecting the changing orders of social representation. These histories are the symptoms of transitional states, where larger, planetary readjustments create localized distortions and conditions of morbidity and entire sectors of skilled labor are at risk of displacement or disappearance.

Julian Rosefeldt´s 9-screen-film installation asylum (2001/02), presented in the main hall of the Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu, focuses on the unacknowledged practices of everyday work routines performed by migrant workers. In these tableaux groups of men and women are cast as players in scenes in which they perform in a Sisyphean manner cycles of menial work that are never to be fulfilled.

Allan Sekula´s Middle Passage (Chapter 3 from Fish Story) (1994) has been characterized as a hybrid, .paraliterary. revision of social documentary photography. Working with industrial subjects over a long period of time Sekula has tried to dissolve the boundaries between essay writing, a .poetics. of sequenced descriptive photographs, and the practices of research in cultural, economic, and social history.

The Cuban duo Los Carpinteros have reappropriated and parodied the image of the preindustrial artisan and his idealized relationship with materials (wood, drawings), nature, and society to develop an artistic practice that draws largely on investigations and readings of objects of everyday life.

In After the Order (2006), Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkácová tackle the issues of hierarchical distinctions among individuals and groups within societies or cultures. The artists transpose the concept of a class society onto Slovakia by creating a living sculpture classified by criteria such as occupation, education, income, power, and social prestige.

In his drawings and sculptures Andreas Siekmann investigates current structures of power within the paradigmatic shifts of neoliberal economies and conceptualizes alternative social models. In 2002 he installed on the Place Royal in Brussels a merry-go-round that revolved around the equestrian statue of Godfrey of Bouillon, the medieval leader of the First Crusade. Under the title The Exclusive, it was reinterpreted in 2007 at documenta 12 in Kassel, where it circled the statue of Frederick II, the duke of Hesse.