[dentifier] K2026-013

"For this work, the conditions of production were located in the gallery only to the extent that, at the time, my life was the gallery." Emile Rubino, 2023.

"For nearly six years I worked in an art gallery." Emile Rubino opens his text for his exhibition Baby, I'm Yours at rhizome_ in Kortrijk with this sentence. For this project, the gallery served as both his workplace and the subject of a series of 'undercover photographs,' including the three works in the Kanal collection. In Musca Depicta [Painted Fly], a fly clings tightly to a dirty cup of coffee, a small sign of life in an otherwise static environment.

In his work, Rubino balances an intimate first-person perspective with the idea that photography can extend beyond the individual eye of the viewer. He works according to strict conceptual and technical processes, yet avoids the conventions of specific photographic genres. Through his photography, he explores how art production, labour and value are interrelated within a capitalist context, his studio often serving as both workplace and subject.

In Baby, I'm Yours, he takes this a step further, using the gallery itself as a studio and creating a series of hidden photographs. In doing so, he blurs the boundary between artistic and ordinary labour, and his practice becomes a quiet form of resistance against the constraints of wage labour. His images show how everyday labour can acquire meaning, prompting reflection on care, maintenance and attention. Artistic work, he suggests, is never separate from labour, but rather both emerges from it and remains constrained by it.