Circular economy

Conveyor belts are a synecdoche for the tenets of flow and circulation that define the industrial age. Christabel Stewart traces how artists have reworked this industrial motif to comment on labour, movement and systems of production.

Michael Landy, Break Down, 2001. Commissioned by Artangel and The Times © Michael Landy. Photo: Hugo Glenndinning.

Text by Christabel Stewart

Factories emerged during the Industrial Revolution, as evolving machinery demanded more space and capital than the cottage industries could provide. Typically, factories housed workers operating machines that transferred each item into the next stage of production. They remain critical to modern economic production, with most of the world’s goods created or processed within them. Henry Ford revolutionised the early 20th century with mass production: highly specialised labourers, stationed alongside a moving line, would construct a product – in Ford’s case, a car. This dramatically lowered production costs across manufactured goods and ushered in the age of consumerism.

Conveyor belts symbolise both collective activity and mass output; they are integral to industry, and automating the movement of goods and materials cheaply and efficiently. Across manufacturing, food processing and warehousing, they improve productivity and accuracy, reduce labour and costs, and keep goods safer in transit. In science, the conveyor belt describes a natural phenomenon: the ocean circulation that helps balance the Earth’s climate. Warm water from the tropical Atlantic moves poleward near the surface, giving up some of its heat to the atmosphere, and moderating cold temperatures at higher latitudes.

Factories remain critical to modern economic production, with most of the world’s goods created or processed within them, yet artists have tended to avoid these sites of production. This piece looks at artists who have used the conveyor belt – industrial mechanisation’s defining symbol – to question how industrial processes, for all their efficiency, sit at the root of both capitalism’s overproduction and its dehumanising effects.

MICHAEL LANDY, BREAK DOWN

Over two weeks in February 2001, Michael Landy painstakingly catalogued all 7,227 of his worldly possessions, including his art, clothes, furniture and car, before sending them down a conveyor belt in a defunct Oxford Street department store to be shredded. The reversal of the production mechanism was a sweeping critique of the consumer culture that constricts our world.

Michael Landy, Break Down sketch edit, 2001

ED ATKINS, SAFE CONDUCT

Safe Conduct is both live-action and CGI video, a burlesque, amplifying airport security instruction videos to Ravel’s Boléro: a carousel of protocol, abattoirs, rendered bodies and metal detectors. The title conjures specious administrative directives, an exceptional state-administered document protecting its carrier, as well as the similarly titled 1958 autobiography by Russian poet Boris Pasternak. Atkins’s piece quotes Pasternak: “Culture, however, is not a maiden that falls into the open arms of the first man willing.”

Ed Atkins, Safe Conduct, 2016 © Ed Atkins. Courtesy the artist, dépendance, Brussels, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, Cabinet, London, and Gladstone

KRISTOFFER MYSKJA, FAILURES IN AUTOMATION

Pink latex pigs move from assembly line to assembly line as part of an advanced production and evaluation process. At the first stop, the pigs are squeezed by a robotic arm that tests whether their grunt works. Myskja is interested in the deluge of goods circulating the world: even the simplest products have origins in complex, globe-spanning manufacturing processes that are often invisible to consumers. Is the resulting flood of things for our enjoyment? Are we detached spectators, or just nodes in this incalculable machinery?

Kristoffer Myskja, Failures in Automation, 2020–2021. Photo: Istvan Virag.

JACK O’BRIEN, A FORMALITY

O’Brien’s large-scale installations examine how objects are imbued with cultural significance and personal association. The alteration and distortion of everyday materials speak to how individuals are bound, twisted and reshaped by environmental pressure and social influence. The sculptures appear as provisional markers: scaffolded remnants holding their place within a larger structure, retaining a senseof potential through their figural absence.

Jack O’Brien, A Formality, Ordet, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Ordet. Photo: Nicola Gnesi

THUY TIEN NGUYEN, PRESS CLUB

Thuy Tien Nguyen’s sculpture mimics industrial production yet resists any efficiency. The work embraces contradiction, creating tension across registers: between rigidity and movement, memory and erasure, glamour and debris. Just as travellers pack aspects of their lives into suitcases, identities jostle with one another through cities and territories. By incorporating the local histories of Phuket and South London, the work references a global system of circulation through which labour and goods flow, and cultures are transformed.

Thuy Tien Nguyen, Press Club, 2025. Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by Thailand Biennale, Phuket and Gasworks, London. Photo: Thailand Biennale, Phuket / Wide Walker

DORA BUDOR, AUTOREDUCTION

Until the mid-20th century, the economy of Salento, in Southern Italy, was centred on tobacco. At the industry’s peak, more than half the subpeninsula’s population worked in its production, most of them women. In her exhibition Autoreduction, artist Dora Budor looked at this history through Italian agritourism, where former tobacco factories are being converted into luxury hotels, to explore how goods are dissected and repurposed. The title refers to a collective anticapitalist strategy of unilaterally reducing the cost of essential items, usually through nonpayment, in the manner of the tabacchine, who worked and organised collectively. In Italy, this famously played out through rent strikes in Rome, Milan and Turin in the 1970s. The exhibition asked how collective action might still be possible amid capitalism’s shifting values. Budor relocated conveyor tables from a disused factory, where they had sat decommissioned for three decades. After the exhibition closed, the conveyor belts were restored as dining tables for a hotel opened by the former owner of the factory.

Installation images from Dora Budor, Autoreduction, 2021. Photo: Simon Veres

DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, IN THE SHADOW OF FORWARD MOTION

In his foreword, the philosopher Félix Guattari observes how modern systems control human desire and expression, and how we might reject these: reclaiming individual identity against oppressive social machinery, exposing capitalist progress as fatal, and framing creative acts as escape. Wojnarowicz’s own writing and visual art draw on motifs of ants, locomotives, money, tornadoes and dinosaurs, juxtaposed with journal entries and other texts examining historical and global mechanisms of power as symbolised through the technology of their times. He uses the fractured experience of his daily life to expose these technologies as weapons of class, cultural and racial oppression.

Image from David Wojnarowicz, In the Shadow of Forward Motion (Primary Information, 2020).

JOANA VASCONCELOS, PASSERELLE (CATWALK)

This mixed-media kinetic sculpture by Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos features ceramic garden dogs suspended by the neck from a mechanised overhead conveyor. When activated, the system crushes the kitsch objects together, creating a violent, noisy critique of consumerism and obsolescence.

Joana Vasconcelos, Passerelle (Catwalk), 2005. Photo: Jean Christophe Lett. Image of the work in the exhibition Joana Vasconcelos: Exagérer pour inventer at Hôtel Départemental des Arts - Centre d’art du Var, Toulon, in 2018

PETER FISCHLI AND DAVID WEISS, THE WAY THINGS GO

Fischli and Weiss’s video work might best be described as a punk Rube Goldberg machine, a series of inanimate objects – including tyres, glass bottles, firecrackers and water jugs – that knock into each other in increasingly violent and absurd ways. An inquiry into the everyday materials that make up our existence, the film transforms the detritus of a workshop or garage into the protagonists of an epic, thirty-minute chain reaction. Casual logic – gravity, acceleration, chemical reaction – gives the rolling of a tyre or the burning of a plywood plank a cinematic tension, speaking to the odd pleasure we take in watching things almost (but not totally) fall apart.

Stills from Peter Fischli and David Weiss, The Way Things Go, 1987. Camera: Pio Corradi. © Peter Fischli, David Weiss, Zürich 2017. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Matthew Marks Gallery, Galerie Eva Presenhuber

SEE RED WOMEN’S WORKSHOP, CAPITALISM ALSO DEPENDS ON DOMESTIC LABOUR

One of many posters by the See Red Women’s Workshop, a collective screen printing studio who looked to challenge chauvinist views of women. Reflecting on the collective’s modus operandi, surviving members Suzy Mackie and Pru Stevenson see the posters as exploring “the personal experiences of women and the oppression of housework, child care, everyday sexism, racism, unequal pay and discrimination. All designs were worked on collectively, with no one individual taking the credit.” The collective’s posters were collated in See Red Women’s Workshop: Feminist Posters 1974-1990 (Four Corners Books, 2016).

See Red Women’s Workshop, Capitalism Also Depends on Domestic Labour, 1975 © See Red Women’s Workshop