From the stock market to the sphere of political activism, human action very often takes place in an office – in fact it becomes an office, and in this office the individual becomes what society expects him to do. This pervasive model shapes the limits and possibilities of human work, and reflects the social tensions and hierarchies its organization produces. The origins of the office can be foun
d in the structures of religious liturgy. From the birth of industry until today, the institution of the office has connected millions of people all over the globe, committed to the realization of progress and its contradictions. The idea behind the exhibition Don’t Embarrass the Bureau is to put together a group of artists whose recent work has consistently questioned the inflexible organization of human activities within so-called machine bureaucracy. Their practices reveal the existing limitations of the societal machine, but also perform an important role in imagining that our society and its rules could be different. It’s perhaps a call to transparency and to the concept of leaked-democracy, that is currently forcing the state apparatus to new arrangements, and is inspiring a re-thinking on how we perform our role as citizens, in the lights of a new paradigm of pervasive visibility.
