[dentifier] K2026-015

"What holds our attention in his photographs are often details that can disrupt our gaze, allowing anecdotes or pictorial oddities to crop up in a given environment and become a discursive subject." Patricia Couvet, on the occasion of Emile Rubino's residency at the CAC La Synagogue de Delme, 2025.

"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. Baby, I'm Yours depicts a wilted bouquet of red amaryllis and green wild branches on an empty reception desk.

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.