THE EXHIBITION

The Best Job in the World brings together works by Cristina Garrido, Luis Gómez Armenteros, and Helena Martin-Franco that evoke the life of the artist across various contemporary socioeconomic landscapes, including Spain, Cuba, and Canada/Québec. Modern-day Sisyphuses in entrepreneurial societies, artists are unconventional workers. Regardless of national context and the specific forms of government support available, they often must take on additional jobs to sustain themselves and their practices while striving to remain creative and relevant locally and, crucially, within the international art market. They face mounting pressure to maintain productivity, remain employable, align themselves with market demands, and meet the expectations of extreme self-sufficiency (Hausmann 2010). Pierre-Michel Menger (2012) also identifies a paradox of creative labour, i.e., the exceptionally high level of skill and qualifications required coexists with the precarious, hyperflexible contracts that define the field. Under these conditions, art functions as a testing ground for the refinement of a neoliberal work ideology that champions adaptation to the cultural market’s demands and conceals a larger public disinvestment in the arts (Borja and Sofio 2009; Menger 2012; Riot 2013; Tétu 2017) El mejor trabajo del mundo (2021), a mixed-media installation by Spanish artist Cristina Garrido (b. 1986), gives this exhibition its title and sets its tone. It recreates an artist’s studio as an immersive theatrical set, surrounding visitors with everyday furniture, symbolically charged objects, and recorded voices. Over two years, Garrido interviewed eight Spanish visual artists who participated in the country’s contemporary art circuits from the 1980s onward and later chose, or were forced, to abandon their practices. Their testimonies offer bittersweet and incisive reflections—alternately deeply emotional and detached—on the extreme, often detrimental lengths to which artists may go in pursuit of recognition from galleries, the art market, exhibition circuits, and art history. They also ask whether such recognition can sustain—or improve—their everyday lives. The spotlight exposes the social and institutional conditions omitted from the dominant narrative of success, which celebrates hard work and perseverance. Visibility in the art world also depends on the ability to build social networks, navigate institutions, and adapt strategically to prevailing cultural norms. As one of the artists heard in the installation puts it: “The light falls on you and then you are the artist. The light turns away and [...] you continue to be an artist, but you are not in the market.” The conversation sustained by The Best Job in the World remains eerily relevant and extends across different geopolitical art contexts. The national contexts brought together by this exhibition have distinct art and funding systems. Artists across these contexts share a position as autonomous workers and receive varying degrees of institutional support. In Québec, recent mobilizations by artists and cultural organizations demanded increased public funding following successive reductions to the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. The 2025 provincial budget answered part of these demands with a substantial reinvestment, and structural pressures persist. In Cuba, support remains concentrated within state cultural institutions. Chronic material scarcity, censorship, and restrictions on autonomous cultural activity sharply constrain independent creators. In Spain, the struggles decried by the voices of El mejor trabajo del mundo remain timely. Furthermore, for diasporic artists, whether in Spain, Québec, or elsewhere in Canada, the challenges can be even greater. Pursuing an artistic career demands exceptional commitment in the face of additional legal, economic, and cultural obstacles that complicate access to resources and visibility.

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

25 July, 18h

The Best Job in the World. A Shared Conversation: a public roundtable on artistic labour, survival, and collective strategies.
with Sheri Avraham, Luis Gómez Armenteros, Helena Martin Franco, Marilyn Volkman, moderated by Analays Álvarez Hernández

This roundtable is conceived as a conversation that extends the exhibition’s themes into dialogue with current debates on artistic labour, fair compensation, precarity, and the structural conditions that make cultural production possible. Who gets to be an artist today? This question opens onto the material, institutional, and social conditions that shape who can sustain an artistic practice, whose work is recognized, and what forms of support are needed for artistic labour to continue. Bringing exhibition participants into conversation with Vienna-based artists, cultural workers, and advocates, the roundtable will address the paradoxes of artistic work today and the challenges of creating within systems that often make artistic practice difficult to sustain. We hope to create a space for exchange across different contexts, including Spain, Cuba, Colombia, Canada/Québec, Austria, and beyond.

Participants are invited to speak from their own experiences, practices, and forms of advocacy. The discussion will be open to the audience, with room for questions, responses, and the sharing of strategies.

ARTISTS

Cristina Garrido (1986, Madrid) creates concept-driven works—mockumentaries, artist books, guided tours, mimetic installations—that dissect the visibility, value and authority structures of contemporary art. Using irony, camouflage and displacement, her sculptures, paintings and spatial interventions infiltrate art-world aesthetics to question authorship, display formats and professional performativity. Operating between research and practice, she interlaces archival strategies with experiential engagement, foregrounding spectatorship as both subject and medium. She studied Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid and Camberwell College of Arts, and earned an MA at Wimbledon College of Art via a Fundació “la Caixa” Grant. Exhibitions: Fondation CAB, Brussels; The British Museum; Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden; Museo CA2M; Centro Botín; CASS Sculpture Foundation; Spike Island, or Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia - EKKM Public talks: The Photographers’ Gallery (London), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) and La Triennale di Milano. Collections: MACBA (Barcelona), Museo CA2M (Madrid), The British Museum (London) and TBA21–Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary amongst others.

Luis Edgardo Gómez Armenteros (Havana, 1968) is a Cuban visual artist based in Madrid. He graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA, 1991) and the San Alejandro Academy (1987), and served as head of the New Media Lab at ISA from 2008 to 2022. He has developed a strong international career, participating in residencies such as Ludwig Forum (Germany), Mid-America Arts Alliance (USA), Art in General (New York), Ohio State University, Arizona State University, and Stiftung Reinbeckhallen (Berlin). His work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (49th and 56th editions), the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba, the Bronx Museum (New York), the Barbican Centre (London), PAC Milano, the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), and the Helsinki City Art Museum, among others. His work is held in collections including the Ludwig Forum (Germany), the National Museum of Fine Arts (Cuba), the Arizona State University Art Museum (USA), the Van Reekum Museum (Netherlands), and the Wakita Museum of Art (Japan).

Helena Martin Franco was born in Cartagena. She lives and works in Tio'tia: ke-Mooniyang-Montréal since 1998. She holds an MA in visual and media arts from UQAM. She is a member of several feminist contemporary art collectives, including L’Araignée (collective of diffusion of contemporary art), La Redhada (network of women artists from the Colombian Caribbean), CAVCA (Community of Visual Artists of Cartagena and Bolivar) and Las meninas emputás! (Feminist collective, anti-colonial activist from Cartagena). Her transdisciplinary practice explores the blending of different artistic processes and the hybridization between traditional and new technologies. Her artistic practice invites dialogue about gender-based violence, immigration and artistic censorship. Winner of the POWERHOUSE PRIZE in 2018, her work has been presented in the Dominican Republic, Lithuania, Spain, New Zealand, Colombia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Iran, Argentina, Cuba, and Canada.

CURATORS

Analays Álvarez Hernández is a Havana-born, Montreal-based art historian and independent curator. She is an associate professor of global art in the Department of Art History, Cinema, and Audiovisual Media at the Université de Montréal. She has co-curated several exhibitions, including The Recipe: Making Latin American Art in Canada (Sur Gallery, Toronto, 2018; OBORO, Montreal, 2020); Au fil des îles, archipels (Galerie de l’Université de Montréal, 2022; Musée Régional de Rimouski, 2023); and On Americanity and Other Experiences of Belonging (Onsite Gallery, Toronto, 2023). Her curatorial approach centers on diasporic experiences, critically interrogating terminologies and categories related to multiple belongings and identities. She frequently collaborates with diasporic artists from a translocal perspective to examine the structural dynamics that shape their artistic practices beyond cultural specificity.

Raquel Cruz Crespo is an art historian with over eight years of experience as a cultural worker in both Cuba and Quebec. She has developed a multifaceted career that combines independent curatorial practice, scientific and cultural research, and cultural programming. In Cuba, Raquel worked in both institutional and alternative art contexts. In Montréal, she has been an associated researcher to the social innovation and research center Artenso, contributing to publications on artist residencies. In recent years in Montréal, she coordinated the programming at DARE-DARE and then continued her work within Montreal’s network of Maisons de la culture, where she currently serves as a Cultural Development Officer in the borough of Montréal-Nord.  A sustained interest in artists' residencies, artists' living conditions, and artistic labor weaves through her practice. These concerns informed the public lecture La zona de opacidad (Madrid, 2024), which explored the often-invisible threads of artistic labor within an industry where work does not carry its conventional meaning, yet still operates through the production, circulation, and consumption of its outcomes.