Curating Social Reproduction
In the call for papers for this event Hemangini and Tatiana asked for creative or artistic provocations which address themeans through which our scholarship might capture issues of social reproduction. My own contribution focused on contemporary art, asking what role social reproduction perspectives play in individual artworks, exhibitions, collections and art history.
In a recent article I identified a ‘social reproduction turn’ in programming across culture institutions in the UK. This is most obvious in the thematisation of care – specifically the labour and processes associated with it – but there’s also a strong interest in the resources and infrastructures associated with social reproduction. This shift has given rise to a number of programming topics, including those dealing with the cultivation, preparation and consumption of food. Art institutions and museums are now awash with community garden projects and cookery skills initiatives, with Firstsite in Colechester even winning the 2021 Museum of the Year Award after transforming into a food bank during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This food trend is often framed in terms of health promotion; most obviously with regard to improving nutrition (with many projects highlighting gaps and inequalities in provision) but also supporting mental health through opportunities for social interaction and exchange. In other words, we see art institutions stepping in to mitigate some of the negative impacts of capitalist life, whether in the form of threats to physical health, marginalisation or social isolation.
Alberta Whittle, business as usual: hostile environment (a remix) (2020-21). Video still.
Established in 2015, the University of Edinburgh’s Contemporary Art Research Collection takes globalisation as its central theme, setting a specific focus on women’s experience and the contributions of feminist thought – specifically social reproduction perspectives. Healthcare is a recurring theme. One of the works acquired for the collection is Alberta Whittle’s video, business as usual: hostile environment (a remix) (2020-21). (University users with an EASE password can access the full film here).
Combining archival materials with new footage and animated passages to link seemingly disparate themes ranging from waterways to the lived experience of shifting immigration policies to the UK’s so called ‘crisis of care’, business as usualnavigates the racialised histories and realities of the National Health Service (NHS) as a vital social reproduction infrastructure.
Produced in the midst of the pandemic, Whittle’s narration describes how the same communities targeted as part of Windrush and hostile environment policies were leading the frontline response to Covid-19 while also dying in disproportionate numbers. Later, black and white footage of people disembarking ships from the Caribbean and London streets daubed with National Front graffiti gives way to an animated documentary passage set in a schematic hospital staffroom occupied by Sims-like avatars in pastel-hued scrubs and identification lanyards. As they move about the room, audio clips gleaned from news reports explain that though the NHS has long relied on workers from overseas, new immigration rules will force thousands of foreign nurses to quit Britain just as system faces acute staff shortages. As the digitally rendered figures ‘voice’ recorded personal accounts of experienced healthcare professionals facing the prospect of losing their jobs, more archive footage of nurses in starched white uniforms evidences the historical dependence of this key symbol of ‘Britishness’ on workers drawn from across the empire.
Whittle’s artwork sits in the collection alongside another begun in the same year which also centres healthcare. Olivia Plender’s socially engaged artwork Our Bodies Are Not the Problem: The Problem is Power (2021- ) springs from two starting points: Glasgow Women’s Library, an accredited museum with an archive and collection dedicated to women’s lives and histories, and the global publication project Our Bodies, Ourselves. First published in the US by the Boston Women’s Health Collective in 1970 to gather and share knowledge, the book went on to be revised, republished and repurposed around the world, adapted to different contexts by local feminist organisations and women’s health groups.
Olivia Plender, Our Bodies Are Not the Problem, the Problem Is Power (2021). Photo on right: Neil Hanna.
Plender’s project spans three phases or parts. The first focused on the refurbishment of GWL’s Community Room, permanently transforming it to make it more comfortable for the individuals and groups who use it. She also introduced a new focus on feminist and queer health activism through archival materials and drawings relating to the histories of Our Bodies, Ourselves and other initiatives including ‘Power Makes Us Sick!’. The second part of the project uses this space as a ‘conversation piece’ within which Olivia hosts a series of meetings for women to share their experiences of living with chronic health conditions. In a deliberate echo of the methods underpinning Our Bodies, Ourselves, these conversations will in turn lead to the creation of a new workbook which is currently in production.
Olivia Plender, Our Bodies Are Not the Problem, the Problem Is Power (2021). Photo: Alan Dimmick. Installation detail.
Both Whittle and Plender’s artworks centre lived experiences of healthcare. They also seek to make visible the past’s relationship to the present in order to build alternative forms of social knowledge. By bringing them together as part of the same collection, their respective critiques of healthcare within capitalist social reproduction are pushed to the fore. We can see how these contemporary artworks move beyond the approach of many health-orientated cultural interventions which frequently individualise problems, making appeals to fuzzy and depoliticised notions of wellbeing to instead address structural roots and conditions or even opportunities for organising within the terrains of social reproduction. Their place within this collection also encourages users to read across and examine the relationships between social reproduction issues from care labour to colonialism and from health to housing.
While continuing to collect and commission new artworks, we are now turning our attention to the infrastructure of the Contemporary Art Research Collection itself. A serious engagement with social reproduction perspectives inevitably necessitates adopting different approaches to conventional collections, prompting questions around who makes acquisition decisions, what kinds of contracts we use, who we partner with and what aspects of the artworks are valued as well as how they are put to use.
Kirsten Lloyd is a Senior Lecturer in the School of History of Art at The University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on late 20th and 21st art and mediation, including lens-based practice, participatory work and realism. She is a Research Fellow with the ‘Feminism, Art, Maintenance’ project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, a member of the Glasgow Housing Struggles collective and the Academic Lead for the University’s Contemporary Art Research Collection. Kirsten is currently working on the next phase of the collaborative exhibition and research project Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism with Glasgow Women’s Library and a book called Contemporary Art and Capitalist Life which has been supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.