Uber Life: Exhibition by Tassiana Aït Tahar
Paris’s Galerie Cent Quatre recently featured the ‘Uber Life’ exhibition by Tassiana Aït Tahar, who is herself a courier. The exhibition aims to shine a light into the life and work of Uber workers. Although unable to attend this exhibit in person due to a plethora of reasons, here at Push the Envelope we explored images of the installation, from this website: www.104.fr and herein provide our impressions of some selected pieces. Our views are not those of an art critic, but rather as bicycle saddle critics having spent so much time on them.
A golden Uber backpack in a display case
MK: An Uber backpack, painted in sparkling gold, sits on display atop a pedestal. The bag, an ubiquitous symbol of delivery life, is an indispensable tool for the job and acts as a uniform forging worker identity. Uber is essentially a luxury service catering to urban professionals with a disposable income. The sparkle harkens to the squeaky-clean image projected by the multinational, even if an actual courier bag smells of soot, sweat, and stale beer. While Uber offers an illusory promise of flexibility, it often leaves its workers with a disappointing paycheque. The piece echoes the adage that not all that glitters is gold.
DOC: I take a rather different view than my comrade here, and it is perhaps a less grounded view. Looking at this bag, I cannot help but think biblically, and see the golden calf. Tassiana Aït Tahar has taken a bag that is fundamentally banal and mass-produced, and elevated it to a position of worship, placing it in a protective case where it is simultaneously beyond reach and immensely appealing. In this elevated position, Tassiana Aït Tahar seems to have created an object that, much like the golden calf, demands adoration and sacrifice but inevitably leads to downfall and suffering. It reminds me of the strange oxymoron wherein a god is represented with an animal image, and yet living animals are sacrificed to appease that idolatrous god. I see supplicants making a request of Uber to satisfy their every whim with instantaneous delivery, and I also see the blood and sacrifices that will be, nay that by nature of the system must be made on that altar to satisfy those requests. When I was working, I was almost killed when I was run over by a large commercial truck. Perhaps I am projecting my personal experiences into this but I cannot help but think of the friends, comrades, and beautiful, wonderful, unique, and fierce couriers who ride in power because their lives were cut short, their blood spilled, their light extinguished, when they were sacrificed on the altar of on-demand delivery.
Standby Spot
MK: This piece deals with the marginal spaces that couriers are forced to occupy while waiting for work. Folding lawn chairs, a shisha pipe, and a soccer ball sit in the foreground on a dusty vacant lot across from a fast-food chain. The chairs are real and gallery visitors may sit, albeit uncomfortably. The restaurant in the backdrop is an enlarged photograph printed on a wall. The gritty street corner represents the final space of urban real estate that is rent free. Couriers can eat, smoke, or work on their bikes without worrying about staining the polluted earth with grease. This no-man’s land is what couriers consider their staff room.
DOC: This is an interesting approach to highlight how couriers are unwelcome in the spaces that depend on them. Our ‘office’ is the street, but we have no water cooler, no break room, no conference room where we can meet, relax, and connect with each other, so we find our own spaces. These lawn chairs exemplify how the community spirit of couriers overcomes the forces that would separate us and divide us. Like the lawn chairs, because they are unkempt, unfashionable, or worn-out, we are often asked to leave office buildings, told not to loiter in restaurants, and shooed away from storefronts because we do not fit into the aesthetic space that companies are trying to create. Yet, these are the very businesses that depend on couriers to keep functioning and survive. This has been further exacerbated by the covid pandemic where many couriers were not even allowed into restaurants, and public washrooms and spaces were closed. For those of you currently sitting on your own clean, new, comfortable office chairs, I want you to imagine an eight hour shift where you have no access to a toilet, unable to use a sink to wash your hands between deliveries, and unable to even enter a building to warm your frigid toes on a cold Canadian winter day. By including the lawn chairs in the exhibit, Tassiana Aït Tahar seems to be inviting the audience to similarly bring couriers into their spaces and see them not as trash on the side of the road but as dependable and essential sources of comfort when all you want to do is relax on the couch with a warm meal, and you’ve chosen to tap on Uber to get it.
UberGame
MK: The final selected installation is an immersive artwork. A stationary bicycle faces a screen onto which is projected films from a courier’s point of view. Gallery visitors straddle the bike and pedal, familiarizing themselves with the choreography of a courier, one perched on the tenets of balance and self-awareness amid traffic. Art moves, but this piece asks you to move — your legs. Visitors might leave this piece wide-eyed and breathless.
DOC: I think that this piece truly encompasses Tassiana Aït Tahar’s vision for this expo. It’s often said that you cannot know someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes, and this piece does just that. Throughout this exhibit Tassiana Aït Tahar seems to have been trying to bring the courier inside and off the street, and in this piece it is now the audience who is thrust onto those very streets. The audience is no longer just a passive observer into the life of the courier, no longer gazing at them from afar, but is now sitting in their saddle. Oftentimes, I think that clients don’t reflect upon what they are asking someone to do. It’s such an easy thing to look outside and think ‘ugh, the weather is really terrible. There’s no way that I would want to go out there and go and get some food, I’ll just order in.’ without considering that the only reason you’re able to do that is because one of us looked outside and said ‘ok, time to go work’. The external and distanced perspective that an app provides also hides the reality of its inner workings, reducing the courier to the pixels on the screen that might only be a name and a pin on a map. While a customer sees a pin on a map slowly moving towards them, in this piece they become that pin, pushing it along through will, determination, and leg-power.
Overall
MK: Tassiana Aït Tahar’s exhibit demonstrates the cruel and unfulfilling metier of the courier. Gold-plated promises at the gate lead down a path of tiresome exertion to a deadend shanty town. Hopes of climbing the social ladder are dashed by omniscient algorithmic management resulting in precarious wages and living standards. The artist’s work permits viewers to peer into the hidden subculture of couriers, a subculture characterized by social marginality and financial vulnerability. The lived professional experience of the artist emboldens the exhibition’s authenticity. Uber couriers risk their safety to deliver your craving, and the exhibit exposes the sobering reality of the occupation. Many see the job as a carefree gig for students. But after experiencing the virtual reality courier bike in the exhibit, gallery visitors will learn that the work is demanding and exhausting. Tassiana Aït Tahar’s multisensory art contributes to the demystification of Uber life and articulates its unsavoury disadvantages to the world of art.
DOC: In our modern capitalist culture, it’s increasingly easier to dismiss individual contributions through such sayings as ‘unskilled labour’, or ‘gig economy’. People are lost in ‘the hustle’ and entire populations are treated as expendable because there will always be someone else who can be brought in to replace them. Tassiana Aït Tahar seems to be striking back at those ideas by refusing to portray couriers as faceless cogs in the Rube Goldberg machine that is activated between the tap to place an order and a piping hot meal appearing on your doorstep. Rather, Tassiana Aït Tahar highlights the individuals, shows us those brief beautiful moments that make up the daily experience of these couriers. Tassiana Aït Tahar shows us the very real, very vulnerable, and very beautiful human side of a silicon digital app.
For more on the exhibit, visit:
Authors:
Michael Thomas Kowalsky — former bike messenger, master’s student focusing on courier working conditions.
David O’Connor, PhD — former bike messenger, current bike enthusiast and Associate Professor of ecology, biology, and environmental studies.
