In 2021, the city’s taxi drivers staged a hunger strike, demanding relief from debt incurred since 2004. The Medallion at Bridget Donahue, New York asks why we never look after our workers
Three illuminated, handblown glass replicas of car engine parts from Kenneth Tam’s series It is no use to worry (all works 2025) are included in The Medallion, a subtle reflection on the New York City government’s ill treatment of cab drivers. The original car parts, aspects of an engine’s cooling system, were designed to accept liquid overflow, since water expands when heated. Tam presents these efficient tanks as glowing ideals, as if to ask why humans can invent a good system to keep a car engine from overheating but not a system that’s fair to people who drive cars for a living.
In the fall of 2021, New York City taxi drivers staged a 15-day hunger strike, demanding relief from debt incurred since 2004, when the city began aggressively promoting a preexisting taxi permit, known as a medallion, to increase city revenues. Unscrupulous lenders made predatory loans to low-income, mostly immigrant buyers trying to purchase their medallions. By the time of the hunger strike, many cabbies owed over $600,000 for a credential whose value had by then plummeted. Several taxi drivers had killed themselves, one by drowning. Officials eventually bent to pressure: since 2021, the city has reportedly paid out millions in relief, an average of $230,000 for over 2,000 medallion holders.
Most of the details are not evident in Tam’s show, although the press release links to a New York Times article that leads down the rabbit hole, and the show is focused around The Medallion (2025), a two-channel intimate documentary video exploring the lingering pain of the crisis. It follows a small group of men driving their cabs, discussing their struggles, swimming fully clothed underwater and performing low-impact exercises individually or en masse, shifting slowly and awkwardly, shambling around looking fatigued and depressed.
Eleven more pieces throughout the gallery – most of them, like Collision or Bag with debris (red ochre) involving broken car parts – are displayed on top of an expansive arrangement of hundreds of beaded seat-covers (370,000 Recitations). Commonly used to help drivers stay cool and comfortable, here these covers are laid out side by side, zipped together and screwed down to cover the substantial length of the gallery like prayer mats. Walk on them, and the ground feels unstable and unsettling; the beads slide underfoot. Anxiety Clock, embedded in the floor covering, resembles an oversize malfunctioning fare meter or a bomb timer working in code.
Another video, Dissolved personal archive (2015–2024), plays on the kind of two-sided monitor often seen on top of taxis. It displays a scroll of images from Tam’s life – children, people in a museum lobby, performers from his earlier work and one of the drivers from The Medallion. In every image, figures disintegrate then vanish, like characters who have been killed in a video game, fodder for deliberate cruelty and schemes. In Dissolved personal archive…, Tam might be providing a warning, however cryptic: in a society that expects exhausted workers to simply carry on, pick up their wages and make their payments, no one is fully protected from the cab drivers’ ordeal.
The Medallion at Bridget Donahue, New York, through 8 March
