Josh Kline explores labour and duration at Dia Beacon
The artist joins curators for an illuminating conversation around Tehching Hsieh's seminal performance work, examining how time, endurance and constraint operate within contemporary artistic practice.
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This Saturday, a singularly compelling conversation unfolds at Dia Beacon, one that promises to illuminate the profound intersections between artistic endurance, labour and the structures that govern our contemporary moment. Josh Kline, whose practice has long interrogated the mechanisms of work and technology shaping modern life, will join Liv Cuniberti and Stephen Kwok in an intimate dialogue centred upon Tehching Hsieh’s remarkable ‘One Year Performance 1978 to 1979 (Cage Piece)’, a work that remains as challenging and revelatory now as it was upon its inception.
The conversation marks the inaugural event within ‘The Waterline Sessions’, an enriching programme that accompanies Dia’s expansive long term exhibition dedicated to Hsieh’s extraordinary ‘Lifeworks 1978 to 1999’. Through this curated discussion, participants will venture into the artist’s radical methodology, one that transforms duration, endurance and constraint into profound artistic enquiry. Hsieh’s pioneering approach has long posed essential questions about the nature of time itself and what it truly signifies to inhabit temporal space within the context of artistic creation.
The resonance between Hsieh’s groundbreaking investigation and Kline’s contemporary practice proves remarkably fertile terrain for exploration. Kline’s work extends these essential inquiries into the present moment, examining how labour, automation and the invisible systems that orchestrate our daily existence operate within current artistic and productive frameworks. In considering how time is spent or squandered under contemporary conditions of work and creation, both artists illuminate the profound philosophical and practical dimensions of artistic practice in the modern age.
This dialogue represents an extraordinary opportunity for those attuned to critical artistic discourse to engage with ideas that fundamentally challenge conventional understandings of artistic production and the value of time itself. The conversation promises to be intellectually stimulating and emotionally resonant, offering insights into how artists continue to deploy duration and endurance as powerful tools for meaning making and resistance within an increasingly automated landscape.
The event occurs at Dia Beacon on Saturday, 17 October 2026, at 2 PM. Attendance is available with museum admission.
Imagery courtesy of Lisson Gallery (@lisson_gallery).