How is it that we do not work to live, but rather live to work, and that we can hardly imagine other forms of life? Taking inspiration from Marienthal’s famous study, In the meantime, midday comes around revolves around such questions. The international group exhibition examines the changes in the world of work over the past decades, made more visible by the Covid-19 pandemic, and considers the methods of collective action and political imagination that such global events bring to reshape the world of work.

To address this complex of issues, the artworks in the exhibition oscillate between several thematic areas: crisis and social collapse, alongside historical and contemporary forms of collective action and workers' organisation (discussed by the research group: Lamine Fofana, Adelita Husni-Bey, Problem Collective and Bassem Saad). "Working Class Art" and "Minimal Collective" engage with other modes of coexistence, such as social connections and practices that question the centrality of labour and reclaim time as the basis of freedom, while Vina Yoon in collaboration with Tine Fetz, Mostari Hilal, Sunanda Mesquita and Patou, as well as Ausländer, consider labour migration and its potential planetary character. In addition, the exhibition also draws attention to the specific conditions of artistic labour and practice - through the presentation of works by the late artist Linda Bilda (who passed away in 2019) and Eva Egermann's perspective on them.

“In the meantime, midday comes around” is a quote from a seminal sociological study on unemployment from the 1930s, Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Communitythat inspired this exhibition project. Researchers Maria Jahoda, Paul Felix Lazarsfeld and Hans Zeisel wrote the book after months of research on Marienthal, a district of the Gramatneusl community near Vienna that was hit hard by the global economic crisis after 1929: almost its entire working population became unemployed.