The MAST Collection – A Visual Alphabet of Industry, Work and Technology

Due to its complexity, The MAST Collection – A Visual Alphabet of Industry, Work and Technology, open from February 10 to May 22, 2022, is divided into 53 chapters dedicated to the numerous concepts illustrated in the displayed works. The exhibition takes the form of an alphabet that unfolds on the walls and which highlights a conceptual system that goes from A for Abandoned and Architecture to W for Waste, Water, Wealth. “The alphabet was created to bring together intersections between the distant and near gaze, texts, and the moments of the snapshots, drawing attention inside of the works,” explains the curator, Urs Stahel. “The same happens with the images and photographers involved. The 53 chapters feel like constellations in which old and young, rich and poor, healthy and sick, factory compounds and factory towns live together. Here, different attitudes, different perceptions and figurations come together. 

Documentary photography meets staged, conceptual art, old papers and processes like albumen prints meet the latest digital prints and inkjet prints, coal black prints meet bright and colorful prints. Bleak, heavy industrial landscapes collide with “bright”, high-tech machines, sweaty labour and manual dexterity collides with digital worlds, with automated data processing, or manifestations on the market and market crashes, with migration and office work.”

Chronologically, only the 19th century was dealt with separately in a section dedicated to the initial stages of industrialization and the history of photography. The themes are interspersed with portraits of labourers, controllers, the unemployed, work seekers, and migrants. “The parallels between industry, photography, and modernism are striking. Photography is a key child of industrialization and yet it also represents simultaneously its most powerful visual report, memory, and commentary”, continues Urs Stahel.