What Is A Body Worth?

Exhibition by Kristine White with Nazanin Zarepour, in collaboration with the United Steelworkers Toronto Area Council Injured Workers Program.

What Is A Body Worth? is a multi-channel video installation that explores questions around what our bodies are worth in the context of market capitalism, how injury is valued, and how workers are often left abandoned by systems that are supposed to protect them. 

The project also explores what happens to the mind when the body is reduced to a tool for alienated labour. Since the inner mechanisms of the mind cannot be fully captured, is this where freedom lies? The installation involves the use of found footage, recorded interviews with Injured Workers Program clients, shadow puppetry, and stop-motion animation. Original compositions and musical arrangements by Sean Donald provide the score for the video. 

This project was developed through Mayworks’ Labour Arts Catalyst in collaboration with the United Steelworkers Toronto Area Council Injured Workers Program.

Co-presented with Charles Street Video.

Kristine White (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist whose works across the mediums of shadow, light, live performance and digital media. Her work is always collaborative, and has been created in relationship with musicians, dancers, theatre-makers, academics, activists, plant and elemental life forces. Kristine’s interest in labour and art has roots in her early involvement in activist artmaking through puppetry and protest art. A focus in her current practise is reflection on the interdependence of modern selfhood, and the ways in which our systems of labour/production/consumption blur that interdependence to make (some of) us feel as though we are existing independently when in reality we are heavily dependant on the labour, bodies, and precarity of many others. Kristine’s project with USWs Injured Workers Program will ask questions about what bodies are “worth” in a system that monetizes not only labour but the myriad nuanced capacities of the body itself. 

Nazanin Zarepour is a writer, researcher, community organizer, and Editor-in-Chief of The Vermin – a critical inter-arts magazine dedicated to centring the marginal and peripheral. Her multidisciplinary work is interested in locating radical alternative futures and avenues for political re-enchantment within the cultural landscapes of the subaltern and the working class. Nazanin’s artistic practice experiments with ways to make text more agile, mobile, and politically disruptive through the use of print and large-format poetry. Some of her works can be found in The Maple, Redaction Politics, Trinity Review, and at Trinity Square Video. 

Jesse Corrigan is a folk musician and singer-songwriter based in Grey County, Ontario. Jesse began playing the guitar at the age of 10 when his mom taught him the chords for “Amazing Grace”. He has always been drawn to the narrative style of folk music and incorporates this into his own songwriting, often adding a touch of humour and lyrical wit. 

The music Sean Donald writes comes from a place of honesty and deep expression. Songs of the human experience, songs of love and loss, good times and hard, his range of sound encompass places of light and dark both familiar and unknown. Drawing from a background in folk music, he merges old roots with contemporary influences to create an ever-changing atmosphere, vast and stark, warm and focused.

Established in 1981, Charles Street Video (CSV) is a non-profit production organization dedicated to supporting media artists. CSV fosters the creation of media art, encourages experimentation, and develops an artistic community in Toronto. CSV is the city’s leading media arts production centre where emerging and established artists gather to achieve their artistic visions. CSV provides affordable access to equipment and post-production editing facilities for creating videos, films, installations and other media art forms. They also commissions artists to create new works, and sponsors a variety of youth-oriented production programs and post-secondary scholarships. CSV actively participates in local exhibitions of media art through partnerships with arts organizations and grassroots festivals.

Steelworkers Toronto Area Council (STAC) represents 14,000 members of the United Steelworkers in Toronto and York Region. Our workplaces include manufacturing, healthcare, post-secondary, banking and other service workers. STAC has a proud tradition of activism and community involvement. We are active in the Campaign for the $14 Minimum Wage, for green jobs, in solidarity with striking or locked-out workers and on many other fronts. We have built picket line support for Steelworkers at Crown Metal Packaging, Vale Inco, US Steel, Rio Tinto in Alma, QC as well as solidarity actions for Toronto municipal workers, library workers and refueling workers at Porter Airlines. We have also spoken out strongly against war and against racism, sexism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination. STAC runs a number of programs including, The Injured Workers Program.  It provides assistance to any member who has put in a claim to the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) regarding a workplace injury. The Program, funded by STAC locals, was born out of the necessity of providing our membership with the best experts in all areas of advocacy and proper representation in Appeals and Tribunals, and return-to-work meetings.