On Care and Citizenship: Performing Healing (in) the Museum

As a result of the most pressing concerns of our global present, care, essential to life and survival, is at the center of political struggles and ethical concerns in the 21st-century. With access to health care infrastructures highly unevenly distributed, and caring labor vastly exploited, care injustice is on the rise. The Waiting Room by artist Simone Leigh addresses these concerns. Dedicated to commemorating care worker Esmin Elizabeth Green, who, after 24 hours of waiting, died in the waiting room of a Brooklyn hospital in 2008, this project transformed the New Museum into a center for care, and political mobilization. Foregrounding the experience of Black female subjectivities, alternative healing, and radical resistance, Leigh’s art-as-social practice gave rise to Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, who used the museum for self-care and political organizing. This essay follows the nexus of care and citizenship through the political dimensions of infrastructural access to health care and culture. Remembering that the modern museum, implicated in the politics and economies of colonial capitalism, created rituals of citizenship based on an exclusionary gendered and racialized notion of the citizen, this essay asks if The Waiting Room enacts a ritual of care as ritual of citizenship

The unfinished feminist revolution : Radicalizing reproduction in feminist performance art

The unfinished feminist revolution is at the heart of this essay. Globally, social reproduction remains a challenge to the feminist revolutionary project. The continuation of life, human and planetary survival, depends on caring labor. Today, caring in common is the new frontier of capitalist enclosure with care injustice deepening. The struggles for freedom to care and for social reproduction justice continue. They are connected to the deep wounds of coloniality within feminism with its painful conflicts among women over race, class, and reproduction. They are owed to the damaging neoliberal erosion of solidarity. Committed to advancing feminist politics that keep alive the feminist revolution and to connecting art to the social and economic conditions of the world at large, the analysis focuses on a critical constellation of three feminist performances: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance (Outside and Inside) at the Woodsworth Atheneum in Hartford Connecticut in 1973; Suzanne Lacy’s Cleaning Conditions at the Manchester Art Gallery and Manchester Arts Festival in 2013, and Patricia Kaersenhout’s The Clean Up Woman at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2016. These performances make public the issue of social reproduction, in particular maintenance and cleaning, in the public sphere of the museum space

Living with an Infected Planet: COVID-19, Feminism, and the Global Frontline of Care

"We must declare war on the virus," stated UN chief António Guterres on March 13, 2020, just two days after the WHO had characterized the outbreak of the novel Covid-19 virus as a pandemic. The author introduces feminist worry in order then to develop a feminist cultural theory on pandemic frontline ontologies, which give rise to militarized care essentialism and forced heroism. Feminist hope is gained through the attentive reading of feminist recovery plans and their novel care feminism, with the latter's insistence that recovery from patriarchy is possible

Die Flucht nach vorne : das Motiv Zukunft in der Weltausstellungsarchitektur der 1960er Jahre

Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium vom 27. bis 30. Juni 1996 in Weimar an der Bauhaus-Universität zum Thema: ‚Techno-Fiction. Zur Kritik der technologischen Utopien

The Unfinished Feminist Revolution. Radicalizing Reproduction in Feminist Performance Art

The unfinished feminist revolution is at the heart of this essay. Globally, social reproduction remains a challenge to the feminist revolutionary project. The continuation of life, human and planetary survival, depends on caring labor. Today, caring in common is the new frontier of capitalist enclosure with care injustice deepening. The struggles for freedom to care and for social reproduction justice continue. They are connected to the deep wounds of coloniality within feminism with its painful conflicts among women over race, class, and reproduction. They are owed to the damaging neoliberal erosion of solidarity. Committed to advancing feminist politics that keep alive the feminist revolution and  to connecting art to the social and economic conditions of the world at large, the analysis focuses on a critical constellation of three feminist performances: Mierle Laderman Ukeles’  Hartford Wash: Washing, Tracks, Maintenance (Outside and Inside) at the Woodsworth Atheneum in Hartford Connecticut in 1973; Suzanne Lacy’s Cleaning Conditions at the Manchester Art Gallery and Manchester Arts Festival in 2013, and Patricia Kaersenhout’s The Clean Up Woman at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2016. These performances make public the issue of social reproduction, in particular maintenance and cleaning, in the public sphere of the museum space

On the Art of Healing: Simone Leigh’s The Waiting Room

The following essay centers on artist Simone Leigh’s work The Waiting Room which took place at the New Museum in New York in 2016. The analytical reflections presented here connect the description of the social and aesthetic strategies of The Waiting Room, a key example of health activism and black feminist practice in contemporary art making, to the broader context of the politics of health, the crisis of social reproduction under neoliberalism, and the gendered and racialized body.