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Woolworst: The Artistic Accountability Project is an independent, non-commercial artistic initiative that uses satire, appropriation, and visual remix to explore themes of corporate opacity, workplace culture, and the gap between public branding and private employee experience within the supermarket industry.
The project's visual compositions were initially conceived for the distinctive proportions of Te Komititanga Square's billboard space, framing this corporate critique within Auckland's central civic landscape. By reworking publicly available advertising materials from a major supermarket chain—playfully reimagined as "Woolworst"—the project overlays anonymised employee-submitted testimonies, redacted documents, and reported workplace concerns onto familiar slogans and imagery. These "artistic disclosures" function as satirical interventions: meme-like compositions that invite viewers to question the stories large corporations tell about care, freshness, and community while highlighting the often-unseen perspectives of the people who stock the shelves, scan the items, and keep the stores running.
The accompanying website serves as a living digital archive for these visual works and as a moderated platform where current and former employees may voluntarily contribute their own factual, first-person accounts and supporting materials (submitted anonymously and reviewed before publication). Every testimony is presented as the personal experience of the contributor, with clear disclaimers that the project is an independent artistic endeavour unaffiliated with any union, legal action, or official investigation.
Framed explicitly as art rather than journalism or legal evidence, Woolworst operates within the protected space of creative expression. It seeks to spark public reflection on power imbalances in low-wage retail work, the limits of corporate self-presentation, and the value of worker voices in an age of polished branding—without making definitive factual assertions on behalf of the artist or the platform.
Woolworst.co.nz