A Cubicle, Terminal at Schwindel LLC, Vienna

A Cubicle, Terminal by Morgane Billuart, Meltem Rukiye Calisir, Xin Huang, Martin Rovan, Paul Seipel, Melanie Sien Min Lyn, Sam Stewart, Twins Corporated, Lourenço Soares, Zein Majali, Zhan Shu, and Lil Clearpill, curated by Helena McFadzean, at Schwindel LLC, Vienna, 14.11.2024–24.11.2024.

Exhibition text:
The office is dead. The desk has been cleared, the last Outlook email sent. And yet, here we are—still thinking about it. A Cubicle, Terminal examines the afterlife of white-collar labor—the aesthetics, rituals, and psychological residue of a workplace that no longer needs a place. Staged in a vacant office, repurposed because no one else wanted it, the exhibition turns the office cubicle into an artefact of a world in decline. Once a space of routine and hierarchy, it now functions as a stage, a ruin, a set piece in the ongoing simulation of work.

The works on view interrogate the breakdown of labor’s spatial logic. Morgane Billuart’s A Door May Open follows an avatar trapped in a content-watching ring, where attention itself has become currency. Melanie Sien-Min Lyn performs a late-night work shift laced with office romance. Accessible via the cubicle desktop, her chat interface transforms viewers into the “boss”, at once an authority figure and an object of affection. Paul Seipel’s ergonomic pebble mats and Xin Huang’s sculpture I’ll Be There aestheticize “corporate wellness,” while Lil Clearpill’s Affirmational Poster pushes workplace optimization to its inevitable endpoint: an AI-powered hustle where image proliferation = currency.

Martin Rovan’s OS X, 10.4, 10.5 draws on the symbolism of Apple’s operating system—a status symbol for Gen X start-up entrepreneurs and freelancers—connecting it with contemporary platform capitalism and increasingly internalized neoliberal exploitation strategies. The juxtaposition of corporate aesthetics with elements of hypernature introduces a playful yet pointed critique of attempts by big tech and modern workplaces to instrumentalize a dangerously constructed ideal of abundant nature in order to naturalize the rigidity of “becoming a dividual” (a core slogan by duo Twins Corporated).

Technobiophilia, as Sue Thomas defines it, reflects our innate tendency to seek nature in digital spaces, particularly as a coping mechanism for the overstimulation and alienation of the attention economy. All of this unfolds under the cold glare of fluorescent lighting, against the synthetic scent of plastic and burlap.

The office, once a site of control, has become a fashion statement to some. Corpcore. Office siren. Aestheticized nostalgia for spaces that once alienated us. As labor detaches from location, we tend to aestheticize what we no longer belong to. If something becomes a core, isn’t that just another way of saying it’s already dead?

This exhibition isn’t a requiem. It’s a terminal: a point of disconnection and re-entry, a screen blinking at the end of a function. What happens when work stops working? And if time is no longer owned by this place, who owns it now?