‘Building as Body’, Manual Labours (2018)

Art, Life and Capitalist Social Reproduction: Curating Social Practice

Journal of Curatorial Studies
Volume 10 Issue 2
2021

https://doi.org/10.1386/jcs_00041_1

Addressing the latest encounter between feminist politics and art, this article identifies a curatorially driven turn towards social reproduction processes and infrastructures across the contemporary art field. It analyses the curatorial mediation of social practice through two UK-based projects that foreground social and economic justice issues, specifically through the politics and economies of food: Effy Harle and Finbar Prior’s Wandering Womb (2018), commissioned by Manual Labours for Nottingham Contemporary, and WochenKlausur’s Women-led Workers’ Cooperative (2013), initiated through Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts as part of the ECONOMY exhibition project. The central argument is that a rigorous engagement with social reproduction perspectives and theoretical vectors is vital to the analysis and critique of feminist curatorial work within the contemporary art institution.