Coalworks

Coalworks

Drawing on Mona Hatoum’s Roadworks (1985), Klitsa Antoniou’s Coalworks (2024) conceptualizes the body as both a site of resistance and an archive of labor and loss. By embedding itself within public space, the performance reconfigures the act of walking as a critical intervention, challenging hegemonic structures that regulate movement, visibility, and historical narratives. Coalworks engages with the philosophical and socio-political dimensions of walking, positioning it as a transformative and subversive act.
Situated in the industrial landscape of Ptolemaida, Greece, Coalworks interrogates the material and symbolic repercussions of industrial labor. Through the repetitive and laborious act of dragging coal, Antoniou embodies the dual burden of physical exertion and the historical erasure of women workers in the coal mining industry. This performative gesture does not merely reenact a historical condition but exposes the ways in which gendered labor has been systematically rendered invisible within industrial and capitalist frameworks. By foregrounding the often-overlooked contributions of women to extractive economies, Coalworks extends its critique beyond economic structures, weaving together feminist and ecological perspectives that complicate dominant discourses on labor.
In resisting the spatial and temporal constraints of the traditional gallery, Coalworks engages directly with public space, fostering an unmediated relationship with its audience. This performative rupture destabilizes conventional understandings of artistic production and reception, foregrounding the ephemerality of embodied action as a form of critical resistance. The work insists on the urgency of confronting historical injustices and systemic inequalities, transforming the act of walking into both a gesture of solidarity and a philosophical interrogation of the socio-political, ecological, and gendered structures that shape collective histories.

Video
Watch the Video