Recent years have seen a growing interest in the topic of care. As this new turn has gained traction, there has also been a surge in political exhibitions about care. More specifically, exhibitions that inquire into the ‘times we live in’ and claim to instigate more caring realities. However, despite the intention of such exhibitions, more often than not there is a gap between the exhibition's stated aims and its effect in the world. Drawing upon the work of Irit Rogoff, and taking the recent exhibition by ‘Laboratory of Aesthetics and Ecology’ as my empirical example, this paper explores how if we can think about the exhibition as a potential ‘space of appearance’, as being about a ‘coming together’, we can begin to create the conditions to expand the political potential of such exhibitions. 

 

The Care Turn

Today’s preoccupation with the topic of care is the result of an ongoing crisis of care, which has become particularly acute over the last forty years. As neoliberal capitalism has been positioned as the organising principle of life, the interests and flows of financial capitalism have been prioritised, dismantling welfare states and democratic processes and institutions. These uncaring practices have seen a growth in economic disparity, environmental degradation, and precarious living situations. This violence perpetrated by neoliberalism also means most of us are less able to provide care, as well as less likely to receive it.[1]

 

The care turn, however, has taken on new life over the last two years, as recent events have made more explicit the carelessness of society. In the summer of 2020, police brutality shed light on systemic racism and the repercussions of our colonial past. While Covid-19, has brought to the forefront some of the structural injustices in our society.[2] With that, numerous texts on this topic have been published addressing current carelessness and professing the urgent need to cultivate practices of care. Including: Emma Dowling’s The Care Crisis, The Care Manifesto by The Care Collective, the anthology The Politics of Care  by Deborah Chasman and Josua Cohen, and Boris Groys' upcoming publication The Philosophy of Care.

 

As this overview demonstrates, entry points into the topic of care are expansive. At the core of this movement though, is an attempt to de-centre the market driven lack of care at every level of society, and put care at the centre of social organisation. In other words, to position care as the guiding principle to shape our political, social, material and emotional conditions, and thus allow the vast majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive - along with the planet itself.[3]

 

The Art World and The Care Turn

The art world itself has been equally taken by the topic of care. Art workers and cultural professionals have expressed concern over accessibility, equality and diversity in the art world, and begun tackling elitism in museums and institutions.[4] At the same time, there has been an explosion of public events, educational programmes, and workshops producing knowledge on the topic, which are relevant to audiences not necessarily invested in artistic debates. These include: HKW’s self-organized school, New Alphabet School; The Bureau of Care, a research platform initiative by State of Concept; and Sass-Fee Summer Institute of Art 2020, which focused on Care, Caring, and Repair in Cognitive Capitalism.

 

With that there has been a surge in political exhibitions about care. More specifically, exhibitions that inquire into the ‘times we live in’ and claim to instigate more caring realities. I think about these exhibitions in terms of being political, because they tend to involve critiques of our present, and explore what a better political world would look like and how we can create it. Anyhow, examples of such exhibitions include, the 2021 edition of Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA) resolved to interrogate the history and repercussions of colonialism; “acknowledge the violence and begin processes of repair.”[5] The recent exhibition, Soil.Sickness.Society at Rønnebæksholm sought to tackle society's preoccupation with productivity, and the detrimental effects it has on both the health of humankind and the earth.[6] And Lastly, the exhibition CLIMATE CARE: Reimagining Shared Planetary Futures by Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, reflected on the countless potentials for reimagining the future of our planet, and called for a “change of our mindset” and to “redefine our relationship to this planet.[7]

 

However, despite the intention of such exhibitions, more often than not, they fail to live up to their hyperbolic claims. They amount to little more than an assemblage of artworks informing the public about topical issues, and are unable to translate into something beyond the exhibition.[8] It could be argued that exhibiting artworks that fit with the exhibition theme, and making public their ideas is enough. However, the discontinuity between the content of the works and the exhibition’s stated aims, reduces the artworks to being merely representational or undermines their intentions as utopian - hindering their affective capacity. To some degree, the extended exhibition programme is the means through which an exhibition’s stated aims are put into practice. Nevertheless, if we rely solely on the exhibition programme then the exhibition itself becomes redundant. The question then becomes, how can we close the gap between the exhibition's stated aims and its effect in the world?

 

Why are they Ineffective?

To answer that question, we need to first understand what makes these exhibitions ineffective at present. Drawing upon the writings of Hito Steyerl, Janna Graham, Valeria Graziano and Susan Kelly suggests that although the art world takes up ‘political projects’ and engages with radical ideas, the structure in which it does so serves instead to produce ‘a parallel world of events and projects detached from sites of action’ and cut off from everyday realities.[9] They go on to explain that because contemporary art institutions’ have alignments with the ruling elements of neoliberal society (states, corporations, private collectors and so forth), and the art world is characterised by temporary and project-based modes of production, radical ideas are increasingly packaged as a new kind of ‘content capitalism, and deliberately separated from their immediate contexts and the politics that they name. As such, contemporary art institutions have become spaces for ‘staging temporary theatres of public discourse’, but which at the same time maintain a strategic distance so as to not provoke social and political antagonisms. Consequently, participants are prevented from “following through the implications of debate and at once blocked from intervening into the conditions spoken of or the spaces they are spoken in.”[10]

 

Speaking more directly about exhibitions rather than the structure of the art world, Irit Rogoff takes a different route to explain why there is a gap between the exhibition's stated aims and its effect in the world. Rogoff argues that the dominant mode of exhibition making at present, is to represent a thematic or topic.[11] This is done by creating a fit between a thematic and a series of works. Since the ‘end goal’ is to represent, it limits the experience of the exhibition to the realm of “individual edification, curiosity and the pursuit of cultural capital.”[12] The problem with this is that, in Rogoff’s mind, the possibility of intervening in a named politics and thus the exhibition having some effect in the world, requires a ‘coming together’ of individuals. It is in this ‘coming together’ we are alerted to shared mutualities, and from which possibilities or action arise. Since the current methodology for exhibition making does not allow the experience of the exhibition to be inscribed in any “dynamics of collectivity,”[13] the public are in fact prevented from participating in political culture.

 

Both of these positions acknowledge that although the art world engages with radical ideas through projects and exhibitions, they are in some way separated from their immediate contexts and the politics that they name. Whether this is because of the institution’s alignments with ruling elements of neoliberal society, or because the exhibition is limited to the realm of representation, they both conclude that the public is in some way obstructed from participating in the politics or ideas that are taken up. Implying also, that public participation is crucial to bridging the gap between the stated aims of an exhibition or project and its effect in the world. Importantly, participation here should be understood in the broadest sense possible. Rather than being something concrete and specific, it should be read more as acknowledging that there is something in circulation between the audience, or experiencing or beyond the consumption of culture.

 

Rogoff and Spaces of Appearance

I would like to stay with Irit Rogoff, in order to think about how to expand the participation of the public in culture so that exhibitions can translate into something beyond the exhibition. For exhibitions to more effectively engage with political culture, Rogoff argues that we need to rewrite the role of the audience. This requires a shift from the experience of the exhibition being about the relationship between passive viewers and objects, to being instead about the relation between viewers and spaces.[14] What she means by this is that we need to de-link the experience of art from individual reflection and the experience of being informed by an artwork. To instead conceptualise the experience of the exhibition to being about a ‘coming together’ in a space, in various forms of collectivity. This coming together functions as the 'space of appearance’ Hannah Arendt invoked to enlarge the understanding of how and where political action takes place. These spaces do not bear the markings of traditional political spaces. It is always a potential space that finds its actualisation in the actions and speeches of individuals who have come together under some common concern.[15] Importantly, it is through this coming together, power springs up and is legitimised, “rather than from any action that then may follow.”[16] As such, it is a form of political action that is founded on "acting without a model and on making "its means as visible as possible”. In other words, the space of appearance, is not a coming together with a strict political agenda or plan forward, but a type of political gathering that makes visible a shared concern, galvanises political momentum and makes possible the possibility of action. Importantly then, the actualisation of the space of appearance requires the existence of other people. For Arendt, this is “because human power corresponds to the condition of plurality to begin with.”[17]

 

If we think about the exhibition as a potential ‘space of appearance’, as being about a ‘coming together’, the exhibition can become a space for the exchange of shared perspectives, insights or subjectivities. No longer is the exhibition a site solely for representing the ‘times we live in’, but a space for producing or alerting us to mutualities or shared concerns. Thus, expanding the public's capacity to participate in political culture and for the exhibition to translate into something beyond the exhibition.

 

As Rogoff argues, the exhibition can actualise a ‘space of appearance’, if we create a shift from exhibitions being about relations between viewers and objects, to viewers and spaces. However, she does not explain explicitly how to do this. If the space of appearance is always potentially there, how do we actually manifest it? In another paper, Rogoff suggests that the space of appearance comes into being through performative acts generated by the audience. These performative acts, include modalities of attention, comments on the work, expressing feelings that arise being in the exhibition etc.[18] While the subject matter of this paper slightly deters from my own interests, what I am interested in is the anecdote she shares which generates these performative acts. The anecdote was about an exhibition at the Courtauld Institute in London. The exhibition had in mind some notion of "democratisation" and “accessibility”, and instead of the artworks being installed in Courtauld Galleries, they were distributed throughout the offices and seminar rooms of the Institute itself. As the public explored the rooms of the institute that they had previously not had access to, Rogoff overheard a series of similar comments. These comments included “it's not that posh" and "What's all the fuss about this place?”, and in Rogoff’s mind were the performative acts required to actualise a space of appearances.[19] What happened next, was that as the public attempted to figure out what had kept them excluded from this elitist institution, the experience of the exhibition began to shift away from being about the individual reflection or edification. Instead, what emerged was some dynamic of collectivity or mutuality, which led to the collective production of “questions concerning the very rights of entry and belonging.”[20]

 

In my opinion, this exhibition would not have had this same effect had it been hosted in a white cube. In the context of an exhibition about ‘democratisation’, opening up the private spaces of the Courtauld alerted the public to something beyond the art and brought about an embodied confrontation with the facade of privilege. In other words, whether intentionally or not, this anecdote indicates that it was the location of the exhibition which generated a shift and brought to the forefront an experience of the exhibition being about the relation between the space and the viewers.

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Location and activating the space of appearance

I want to draw upon a recent exhibition by Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology to support this. The thematic exhibition, titled m/other, took ‘mother-ness’ as a nodal point to assemble a new reality premised on care.[21] Moving beyond conventional understandings of the term, here, ‘mother’ or ‘mother-ness’ stood for an expanded notion of kinship, one that goes beyond caring for one’s offspring and familial networks. To activate these different notions of care or mother-ness, the selected works offered ways of engaging with the world outside secular narratives, and sought to restore connections to alternate histories, the Earth, other communities, and different species.

 

The works were distributed throughout the eight rooms of the exhibition space. On arrival, I entered the first room on my left, where the walls softened into patchwork cloth. Text undulated across the fabric squares, which were part of a performance titled armes molles (Soft Weapons) by Loup Riviére. The three textile pieces formed a screen of protection around a colourful pillowed landscape by Elisabeth Kiss, which unfurled along the ground. Headphones were strewn across it, the cord trailed to a TV screen. Aptly titled, Hvem bærer dig? (Who Carries You?), I offloaded my weight onto the cushioned floor piece and nestled down to watch Tabita Rezaire's, Sugarwalls Teardom. A child rolled around on the cushions beside me. The work confronted and attempted to heal the violence inflicted upon Black women by colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist systems for medical research. I inhaled deeply as the protagonist of the work, a spiritual guru, guided a closing meditation that focused on healing our wombs. The adjacent room hosted the aftermath of Signe Johannessen’s ritual, Braiding for Recovery. Suspended from the ceiling was a chandelier made from animal skeletons. On the floor beneath, skulls were positioned in a circle. Holding space for our animal ancestors, they alluded to unwritten histories and tacit knowledge long suppressed. In the centre of the ring human and horse hair, gently braided together, accumulated in a pile. Here human and animal became entangled, weaving together newfound connections and relationships. Under some sort of enchantment now, I became quickly submerged in Astrida Neimanis' poetic video lecture, So Tired, the Sea, in the next door room. A woman anchored in sea kelp, swayed with the motion of the waves. I joined her in the wet, being forced to slow down as our bodies collided with water molecules. I re-emerged from my watery repose, enclosed within Michala Paludan’s tulle cubicle curtain, Udvortes/indvortes (External / Internal). A toothpick, surgical equipment, dried plants and other ingredients used in traditional medicine and as herbal remedies for issues related to pregnancy and labour, had been laced within the netting. Visible through the curtains, a chair was poisoned in front of a television screening Mia Edelgart’s video piece, Redigerede fødsels-billeder, (Edited birth pictures). Together, the uncensored footage of childbirth and the delicately adorned curtains, put forward an expanded approach to medical care.

 

The contents of the artworks and the way they had been grouped together represented the thematic and inevitably affected the public's experience of the exhibition. However it was the location that shifted the exhibition from being just another assemblage of artworks representing a thematic to do with care, to having the potential to translate into something beyond the exhibition. A central aspect of the exhibition concept was that building new caring realities requires not only creating more caring subjectivities but also rethinking our institutions. The curators did this by hosting the exhibition in a disused wing of Sankt Elisabeth Hospital in Amager, Copenhagen. I had arrived at the exhibition with a strange feeling in my stomach due to the apprehension of entering a hospital. However, as I explored the exhibition the uncomfortable feeling was quietened by warm anticipation. It became apparent that this selected location was not just a gimmicky add on, but an active attempt to remake our spaces for healing and care, which made visible the possible-ness of doing so, and demanded that we do the work now. No longer detached from a site of action, it allowed for the active production of questions about the institutions, or healing spaces that we need. With that, and to go back to Rogoff, there was a side-lining of the exhibition being about our individual experience of the art. Instead, what took centre stage was an awareness that we had come together over a shared concern about the lack of care in our society, which in turn galvanised an urgency around this concern. The space was less like another white cube, but more of a political assembly of sorts.

 

Plurality and Expanding the scope of enactment

Up until now, we have been thinking with Rogoff to create the conditions to manifest the space of appearance and shift the public from being viewers to participants. But how do we expand the scope of enactment?

 

In Rogoff’s space of appearance, it is important that a plan for direct action is kept at bay in favour of a process of ‘coming together’ that is founded on acting without a model. It is a process that constantly shifts and renews itself as the audience changes. Borrowing words from Jean Luc Nancy, Rogoff explains that, importantly, this coming together “expresses a plurality, expresses ‘our’ being divided and entangled.” It is a “stage on which several can say ‘I’ each on his own account, each in turn”.[22] In this process we are alerted to overlapping perspectives and subjectivities. This allows for the production of various forms of collectivity, which in turn expands the public's capacity to participate in political culture.

 

Thus in order to produce new mutualities to expand the scope of enactment, we need to ensure there is plurality in our ‘coming together’. Rogoff mentions that plurality goes beyond demographics, but does not elaborate. The solution however, is not to think only in terms of the familiar categories of class, gender, taste, political or sexual orientations. This will only produce expected mutualities. Instead, to produce new and yet to be discovered mutualities, perhaps it would be beneficial to approach how we create plurality in terms of who they are or what they do. Are they politicians, activists, scientists, grandparents, chefs, students, architects, or people on zero hours contracts?

 

Whether or not it had been the intention of the curators, the ‘we’ who gathered at the m/other exhibition, was noticeably different to other exhibitions. There are several factors that may have contributed to bringing more plurality to this ‘coming together’. Firstly, the exhibition was located in a still functioning psychiatric hospital. The curators were very conscious of this and sought to ensure the exhibition was accommodating to the people already in the building. Consequently, this public included patients, friends and relatives of the patients, doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals. Secondly, the exhibition concept was located in the intersection between caring practices and motherhood. This welcomed individuals into the space usually excluded from the public sphere because of parenthood. The very noticeable presence of mothers, parents and children, was also most likely related to the fact that the curators themselves are mothers, and as such have some sort of related personal network.

 

As I walked around the exhibition and acknowledged who was part of this ‘coming together’, not only did it alert me to new mutualities, it prompted me to think about the possibilities that could arise from these newly produced mutualities. It also got me thinking about what other ways plurality could be nurtured. Perhaps other ways would be to actively invite groups and organisations for whom the exhibition content would be relevant, as well as collaborate with such groups in the building of such exhibitions.

 

Conclusion

The premise of this paper is that the exhibition can move beyond solely representing the ‘times we live in’ and instead translate into something beyond the exhibition, if we rewrite the exhibition as being a space for the ‘coming together’ of a public. This ‘coming together’ allows for the exchange of perspectives, insights or subjectivities, where we are alerted to shared mutualities. While this doesn't produce a strict plan of action, it does make the possibility of action or a means visible.

 

We can actualise the space of appearance by hosting exhibitions in unexpected locations. Specifically locations that in some way dismantle the barrier in place that makes the exhibition detached from sites of action. As the m/other exhibition demonstrated, hosting the exhibition in a hospital actively rethought our institutions of care, and made visible the possibility of doing this work now. In this urgency, the individual's experience of the art was side-lined, and replaced by an awareness of a public who had come together over a shared concern.

 

Importantly, however, since the space of appearance is always a potential space, in order to expand the scope of enactment, it requires the constant production of shared mutualities. In other words, there must be plurality in the audience. While this could have been developed further, at the m/other exhibition the location, the curators personal networks and the exhibition theme which bridged different topics, served to expand the plurality of the public. Consequently, shared mutualities were produced between mothers, parents, children, patients, friends and relatives of the patients, doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals. Although this paper does not state what to do once the public is alerted to new mutualities, what it does do is explain how we can create the condition so as to be alerted to these mutualities and allow for possibilities or action to arise from these mutualities.

 

[1] The Care Collective Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Litter, Catherine Rottenberg and Lynne Segal, “The Care Manifesto - The Politics of Interdependence”, (London: Verso, 2020) 4

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[2] Yesomi Umolu “On the Limits of Care and Knowledge: 15 Points Museums Must Understand to Dismantle Structural Injustice”, artnet, June 25, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/opinion/limits-of-care-and-knowledge-yesomi-umolu-op-ed-1889739

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[3] The Care Collective, “The Care Manifesto”, 19

 

[4] Staci Bu Shea, “Care in Times of Care”, metropolism, April 13, 2020 https://www.metropolism.com/nl/opinion/40802_care_in_times_of_care
See also: Maura Reilly, “What is Curatorial activism”, artnews, November 7, 2017 https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/what-is-curatorial-activism-9271/

 

[5] “Framework”, gibca, accessed January 10, 2022, https://www.gibca.se/en/gibca/gibca2021/framework/

 

[6] Rønnebæksholm, “Soil.Sickness.Society [press release]”, pdf, May 10, 2021. https://roennebaeksholm.dk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/pressemeddelelse-10.05.21.pdf

 

[7] “Climate Care: Reimagining Shared Planetary Futures”, e-flux, accessed January 10, 2022, https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/400685/climate-care-reimagining-shared-planetary-futures/

 

[8] Beatrice von Bismarck and Irit Rogoff, “Curating/Curatorial: A Conversation between Irit Rogoff and Beatrice von Bismarck”, in Cultures of the Curatorial, ed. Jörn Schafaff, Thomas Weski, and Beatrice von Bismarck. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 24.
I make this claim based on the fact that these examples all follow the dominant mode of exhibition. As Rogoff states, the dominant mode of exhibition making tends to produce disjuncture between the ambitions of a projects and its ability to fulfil itself.

 

[9] Janna Graham, Valeria Graziano & Susan Kelly, “The Educational Turn in Art”, Performance Research, 21:6, (2016) 29-35 DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2016.1239912

 

[10] Graham, Graziano & Kelly, “The Educational Turn in Art”

 

[11] Bismarck and Rogoff, “Curating/Curatorial” 22-38

 

[12] Irit Rogoff, “We - Mutualities, Collectivities, Participations” in: ed. I Promise its Political. (Museum Ludwig: Cologne, 2002) 127. 133

 

[13] Ibid.

 

[14] Rogoff, “We”.

 

[15] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) 198–9.

 

[16] Hannah Arendt Crises of the Republic. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972) 151.

 

[17] Arendt, The Human Condition, 201.

 

[18] Irit Rogoff, “Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture” in After Criticism New Responses to Art and Performance, ed.Gavin Butt, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 117-134.

 

[19] Rogoff, “Looking Away”

 

[20] Ibid.

 

[21] “mother”, labae, accessed January 10, 2022, http://www.labae.org/project#/mother

 

[22] Rogoff, “We”, 131