Thousands who are walking have never had a name
Four colour screen-print on Queen’s Mills tea towels, blood glucose test slides, text and stereo sound, L 428 x W 378,
Open Studio, Jan Van Eyck Academy, 2023
Open Studio, Jan Van Eyck Academy, 2023
An attempt to visualise the universal equation of apparel industries’ labour productivity: (output-hour/input-hour)/100 to show how workers become numbers. By following an imaginary number of production runs at a Bangladeshi garment factory, Sattar has calculated labour productivity at 30 workers per hour, at 69.44 per cent.
The installation includes the results of 30 blood glucose tests taken from factory workers ostensibly measuring their energy input, presented alongside photographs of the same workers’ hands, screen-printed onto 69 muslin tea towels. Laser levels mark the remaining 0.44 per cent, completing the labour productivity equation.
Bengal was once the epicentre of fine muslin production. What is known as Dhaka muslin was a delicate, elaborately handspun yarn sourced from a rare cotton. In contrast, the screen-printed towels in Sattar’s installation were produced in Burnley, England, at the last remaining steam-operated weaving mill in the world. Her works draw a thread from the industrial revolution to today to portray how coloniality capitalises on numbers since the rise of the labour economy