Abstract/Summary

This dissertation addresses the contradiction in the arts whereby care is a recurring theme of exhibition and event series (the “caring turn”) yet uncaring conditions for art workers and audiences persist, taking the form of precarious labour conditions and inadequate support for cultural practitioners with caregiving responsibilities. Featuring a Marxist-feminist analysis of domestic and care work from medieval times until today, the study illustrates how today’s visual art sector particularly excludes cultural practitioners who are carers. Expanding from the author’s participatory curatorial practice on care as artistic director 2019–20 at M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung in Hohenlockstedt, Germany, the dissertation establishes curating – with its etymological origin in the Latin curare (“to take care”) – as a radically relational, infrastructural practice of care in search of a counter-hegemonic otherwise. It proposes understanding care as a curatorial method for constructing “caring infrastructures” within the arts. Caring infrastructures emerge from a methodological sequence revolving around the building of support structures that respond to the caring needs and capacities of artists, collaborators, audiences, and team members and that foster the conditions for their presence. This transformative approach identifies eight key building blocks for curatorial practice (e.g., communication, budgets, power) and illustrates how to alter them according to feminist care ethics (Joan Tronto). When taken together, they act as caring infrastructures. The study further explores the limits of curatorial care due to group conflicts, solitary struggles, and systemic contradictions within capitalism, curating, and care. It suggests transferring Chantal Mouffe’s notion of “acting in concert” from activism to the arts, with various artistic and curatorial initiatives coming together in a counter-hegemonic effort of “caring in concert.” Incorporating autotheory and feminist research methods (Jane Gallop, Jane Tompkins, Lauren Fournier, Sara Ahmed), the dissertation aims to amplify marginalised voices, especially those of women and queer and racialised people. The research adopts a “polydisciplinamorous” approach (Natalie Loveless), prioritising affective attachments (Audre Lorde) over traditional disciplinary boundaries and blurring the lines between theory and practice in a process of “makingthinking” (Loveless).