Join us for a free talk between curator and writer Kuba Szreder and theorist and writer Andrea Phillips to mark the launch of Szreder's new book The ABC of the Projectariat: living and working in a precarious art world published by the Whitworth and Manchester Unversity Press.

The conversation will be introduced by Alistair Hudson, Director of the Whitworth and Manchester City Galleries.

The ABC of the Projectariat: living and working in a precarious art world is a book about the life and work of the artistic projectariat, people who do projects to make a living.

In an accessible ABC format, the book exposes the structural underpinnings of these tensions, isolating traits such as opportunism, neoliberalism, inequality, fear and cynicism at the root of the condition of the projectariat. This discussion is paired with a practical account of different modes of action, such as art strikes, productive withdrawals, political struggles and better social time machines. The book argues that just as proletarians had nothing to lose but their chains, the projectarians have nothing to miss but their deadlines.

The book is the first in the Whitworth Manuals series that looks at how artists and art workers are trying to change the world. From food production and economics to the environment and healthcare, artists increasingly use the systems of daily life as the materials and tools of thier work, with the intention to organise them otherwise. Each book takes up a set of ideas and practices and imagines them anew.

Buy a copy of the book here

Dr Andrea Phillips is BALTIC Professor and Director of BxNU Institute, Northumbria University & BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Andrea teaches and writes about the economic and social construction of public value within contemporary art, the manipulation of forms of participation and the potential of forms of political, architectural and social reorganization within artistic and curatorial culture. Her current research project, conducted with artist Jason E Bowman and curator Sophie Hope, involves a social, political and aesthetic re-reading of the British community arts movement from the mid-1970s to the present. View a list of publications here

Kuba Szreder is lecturer in the department of art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He combines his research with interdependent curatorial practice and has made over a hundred projects as a freelance curator, writer, lecturer and organiser. He has co-initiated and cooperated with numerous collectives, research clusters and artistic trade unions on local and international scales, such as Free/Slow University of Warsaw, the Centre of Plausible Economies in London and the Consortium for Postartistic Practices in Poland. He is an author and editor of multiple readers, articles and book chapters on theory and sociology of contemporary art.