International Conference – Cooking, Cleaning, Caring. Care Work as a Global Issue in Contemporary Art

Since the 1960s women artists around the world have been critically engaged with gender politics and the social consequences of care work. Until today, they develop artistic techniques to question the division of productive and reproductive labor, but also initiate a fundamental debate about the status, value and meaning of (artistic) work as well as the equal distribution of labor. The international conference brings together experts from Latin America, Eastern and Western Europe, Asia and the U.S. to discuss and re-evaluate this international artistic practice. Leading questions are: How is care work enacted and which layers of the work become visible? How do the positions reflect the issues of globalized care work and the (post-)colonial division of labor? And what does it mean for an art historical practice to include care work as a theoretical framework and critique of artistic production?