BERLIN.- Alicja Rogalska designs collective situations – such as workshops, performances, dinner parties, and live action role-playing games (LARP) – that evolve through shared negotiation of both process and outcome. The artist specifically invites individuals from certain communities to engage in dialogue, make their voices heard, and develop emancipatory approaches for the future. Rogalska often collaborates with people from economically or politically precarious contexts, including migrant farmworkers on the channel island of Jersey, street musicians in Jakarta, and flower farmers in the Czech Republic. She also involves activists, lawyers, and researchers to examine social inequalities related to labor, migration, gender, climate, and rural areas. While these gatherings are frequently translated into video works, they may also result in songs, images, or objects that reflect the collective process. Rogalska’s practice incorporates methods of experimental learning, feminist knowledge production, frameworks of care, and nonhierarchical structures, continually renegotiating art’s potential as a tool for community building.
In her latest works, Rogalska stages utopian scenarios, opening up speculative spaces to imagine futures free from isolation and exploitation. For her exhibition at n.b.k., the artist engaged in conversations with Berlin-based bicycle couriers who deliver orders placed through digital platforms like Lieferando, Wolt, Flink, and UberEats. Although their colorful thermal backpacks are a familiar sight on European city streets, couriers face an often-overlooked reality: Many are paid per delivery, rely on their own bikes, and follow demanding schedules set by algorithms that disregard basic human needs, imposing time pressures even in poor weather. The riders are often self-employed, with minimal social insurance provisions. In addition, the predominantly migrant workers with limited local language skills and knowledge of German law, are frequently hired by subcontractors operating outside German labor regulations. Despite these precarious conditions, which offload business risks onto the workers, so-called platform work (or the gig economy) remains, for many, one of the few accessible means of income. For several years now, bike couriers around the world have fought the poor working conditions through organizing protests and strikes and solidarize through forming cooperatives.
The economic reality of the gig economy is a critical area of negotiation for the future of labor and serves as the starting point for Rogalska’s new video installation. Drawing on the ongoing struggles of couriers against systemic injustices and for improved working conditions, the exhibition Terms and Conditions explores emancipatory economic models that challenge the logic of capitalism. As in her previous projects, Rogalska’s protagonists are presented neither as individuals nor mere representatives of a social phenomenon; rather, they are part of a temporary collective formed within the artist’s framework to explore possibilities for action.
Alicja Rogalska (*1979 in Ostrołęka / Poland, lives in Berlin) received the Berlin Art Prize in 2022 and was a 2020–2021 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program scholarship recipient. Recent presentations of her work include at the Biennale Matter of Art, Prague (2024); Kunsthalle Recklinghausen (solo, 2024); Biennale Videobrasil, São Paulo (2023–2024); Jogja Biennale, Yogyakarta (2023); Urbane Künste Ruhr, Essen (2023); Manifesta 14, Prishtina (2022); and Temporary Gallery, Cologne (solo, 2021-2022). Rogalska is currently pursuing a PhD in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London.
