Postwork imaginaries: The workshop in art education

Abstract

This article examines the workshop as a central pedagogical format within contemporary art education through the lens of labour, subjectivity, and postwork theory. Drawing on personal experiences of organizing and facilitating dramaturgy workshops across European art institutions, it questions how workshops reproduce or challenge the precarious labour conditions that characterize artistic work. Engaging with Kathi Weeks’s concept of postwork imaginaries, the article argues that workshops should be understood not only as sites of artistic experimentation and learning but also as infrastructures that shape collective subjectivities and labour relations. Through examples from higher art education, it highlights how workshops can blur the boundaries between education and professional work, sometimes normalizing unpaid labour and competitive individualism. In response, the article proposes reclaiming the workshop as a collective and political space that prioritizes solidarity, interdependence, and the material needs of students-artists. Rather than preparing individuals for a precarious cultural sector, workshops could become infrastructures for collective support and resistance, enabling alternative social and political imaginaries within art education.