Take Care joins efforts with over 100 artists, activists, curators, and researchers to reimagine cultures and politics of care. Its first circuit, Labour of Curation, works between two tasks. The first is to begin to contour societal care crises and their differential effects while simultaneously reasserting care as a collective practice of resilience amid structural forces of neglect. The second task is to not seal off the institutional context in which Take Care itself is hosted. Labour of Curation reflects on art’s implication in, rather than detached observation of, the crisis of care. A gallery is not a sanctuary but a site where distinct “dilemmas of care” manifest, and are continually negotiated.1 Reframing cultures of work and interaction in art institutions through a care lens, Labour of Curation monitors the work of custodianship in the face of certain fragility; tarnishes the polish of the exquisitely mounted exhibition by highlighting the material labour its production entails; traces lineages of radical feminism and theories of social reproduction that are vital to a political reckoning with care crises; explores tactics for unsettling the congruence of curatorial labour and valorization regimes under contemporary capitalism; and stages conversations to counter care gaps in cultural labour economies with proposals to prioritize tending to livelihoods.
—Letters & Handshakes
In a contemporary context in which many individuals and groups feel under-valued and uncared for, Habits of Care addresses the links between the care of the self and collective care, asking where they overlap, and where they diverge and conflict. Recalling the etymological roots of the word ‘curating’ in the Latin word for ‘caring,’ the exhibition is prompted by concerns with how the rhetoric of care plays out in the fields of art, culture and beyond. It points to where care is typically invested, and where it falls short, raising questions about how we might develop new habits of care that encompass both human and non-human others.
—Helena Reckitt
How To Order
To order any of our publications, please send an email including title(s), number of copies, and your mailing address to: blackwood.gallery[at]utoronto.ca.
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- Contributors
- Lisa Busby
- Claire Fontaine
- Deborah Ligorio
- Paul Maheke
- Raju Rage
- Amie Siegel
- Laura Yuile
- Amber Berson
- Nicole Cohen
- Kay Dickinson
- The Element Choir
- EMILIA-AMALIA
- Janna Graham
- Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn
- Precarious Workers Brigade
- Joshua Vettivelu
- Boo Watson
- Christina Rousseau
Lisa Busby is a London-based composer, vocalist, and DJ. She performs and composes with bands The Nomadic Female DJ Troupe, Rutger Hauser, and Sleeps in Oysters, as well as working independently as a solo artist. She has released with record labels Seed and The Lumen Lake. She is particularly interested in using domestic or outdated playback media as instruments, but also works in long duration forms, performance video, text-based score, installation, and site-specific performance. Lisa has performed and exhibited in various solo and group situations internationally. She is also Senior Lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Claire Fontaine is a collective artist based in Paris. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seems to define contemporary society. Her works have been shown internationally in major institutions across Europe, North America, and Asia, and she has published with Mute, one star press, Dilecta, e-flux journal, Derive Approdi, and il Mulino.
Deborah Ligorio is an Italian artist based in Berlin. Her research brings together technological, ecological, and feminist thinking. She was awarded the 15th Quadriennale di Roma Young Art Prize (2008), and the Special Prize GAI - Italre Italian Studies for PS1 MoMA (2004). Her works have been shown and performed in events, group and solo exhibitions at institutions including: Savvy Contemporary and Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin), ICA (London), Hangar Bicocca (Milan), Manifesta7, and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin). In 2013, she published Survival Kits with Sternberg Press. She is the founder of the online platforms [The Eponym] and DadaAda.
Paul Maheke was born in Brive-la-Gaillarde and lives and works in London. In 2011 he completed an MA in art practice at l’École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy and, in 2015, a program of study at Open School East, London. Maheke was awarded the South London Gallery Graduate Residency 2015–16. His recent projects include Prix Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris; Performa 19, Abrons Art Center, New York; Elements of Vogue!, Chopo Museum, Mexico City; OOLOI, Triangle France-Astérides, Marseille; The Distance is Nowhere (in collaboration with Sophie Mallett), ICA Miami; Sènsa (in collaboration with Nkisi and Ariel Efraim Ashbel), Blockuniverse, London; Meetings on Art, performance art program at 58th Venice Biennale; A Fire Circle for a Public Hearing, Chisenhale Gallery, London; Letter to a Barn Owl, Kevin Space, Vienna; A cris ouverts, Biennale de Rennes; and Give Up the Ghost, Baltic Triennial 13, Tallinn.
Raju Rage is an interdisciplinary artist who uses art, education, and activism to forge creative survival. Based in London and working beyond, they primarily use their nonconforming body to bridge the gap between dis/connected bodies, theory and practice, text and the body, and aesthetics and the political substance. They work in performance, sculpture, soundscapes, and moving image, utilising everyday objects and life experiences to build new narratives of gender, race, and culture. They are an organizer with Collective Creativity arts collective. Recent performance and exhibition venues include ICA and Showroom (London), Nottingham Contemporary, and nGbK and xart splitta (Berlin).
Amie Siegel is an American artist known for making layered, meticulously constructed works that consider the undercurrents of value systems, cultural ownership, and image-making. Her work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions and collected by museums throughout the United States and Europe, and she has had recent solo exhibitions at the South London Gallery (London); Metropolitan Museum of Art, (New York); and the MAK (Vienna). She has been a fellow of the DAAD BerlinerKünstlerprogramm and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulton Fellow at the Film Study Center at Harvard University, and a recipient of the ICA Boston’s Foster Prize, as well as Sundance Institute and Creative Capital Awards.
Laura Yuile is an artist based in London. Her work has been shown in recent exhibitions at Arebyte LASER (London), T-Space (Milan), Republic (London), Generator (Dundee), The Wiener Art Foundation at Parallel Vienna, and the Savoy Centre for Glasgow International. In 2015 she was an Associate Artist at Open School East and graduated in 2017 from the MFA program at Goldsmiths, London. Between 2012–13 she led a series of symposia on Comfort Zones in various IKEA showrooms. Forthcoming projects include a residency in Beijing as a recipient of the Red Mansion Award, and a group exhibition at Mauve, Vienna.
Amber Berson is a writer, curator, and PhD student conducting doctoral research at Queen’s University on artist-run culture and feminist, utopian thinking. She most recently curated World Cup!; The Let Down Reflex (with Juliana Driever); TrailMix (with Eliane Ellbogen); *~._.:*JENNIFER X JENNIFER*:.~ (with Eliane Ellbogen); The Annual Art Administrator’s Relay Race (2013, with Nicole Burisch); and was the 2016 curator-in-residence as part of the France-Quebec Cross-Residencies at Astérides in Marseille, France. She is the Canadian ambassador for the Art+Feminism Wikipedia project. Her writing has been published in Breach Magazine, Canadian Art, C Magazine, Revue .dpi, Esse, FUSE Magazine, and the St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies.
Nicole Cohen is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Writers’ Rights: Freelance Journalism in a Digital Age (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), which examines the labour politics of freelancing, and is a member of the collaborative research project Cultural Workers Organize, which engages with media and cultural workers’ collective responses to precarity. Nicole is on the Advisory Board of the Canadian Intern Association.
Kay Dickinson is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Programme Director of Film Studies at Concordia University. Her recent published work, Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond thinks through how cinema functions amid and in resistance to the machinations of transnational global capital. Her current project focuses on offshored film production within free zones that is facilitated through the principles of logistics. Prior to her move to Concordia, Kay taught at King’s College and Goldsmiths, both within the University of London. While there, she became a collective member of Precarious Workers Brigade.
The Element Choir is an improvising choir based in Toronto, Canada, created by Christine Duncan and Jean Martin and directed by Christine Duncan. The Element Choir works with both structured and non-structured elements, based primarily on a system of conduction cues. As an ensemble they explore textural and timbral sound qualities, soundscapes, rhythmic patterns, sound poetry, musical genre interplay, and extended voice techniques. This cinematic approach to group vocalizing presents both tonal and non-tonal material in a constantly evolving and “in the moment” sonic environment.
EMILIA–AMALIA is an exploratory working group that employs practices of citation, annotation, and autobiography as modes of activating feminist art, writing, and research practices. Through readings, screenings, discussions, and writing activities, the group investigates historical and intergenerational feminisms, as well as relationships of mentorship, collaboration, and indebtedness between artists, writers, thinkers, curators, and practitioners. In tracing these lines, the group aims to elucidate the histories of feminism that have been obscured and overlooked in the narratives of 1970s, or “second-wave” feminism that we have inherited. EMILIA–AMALIA is initiated by Cecilia Berkovic, Yaniya Lee, Annie MacDonell, Gabrielle Moser, Zinnia Naqvi, Leila Timmins, and cheyanne turions.
Janna Graham is a practice-based researcher who has worked in the curatorial field for nearly twenty years, occupying positions at institutions such as Whitechapel and Serpentine Galleries, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Nottingham Contemporary, and developing projects for Van Abbemuseum and the New Museum. A key figure in what has been termed “the educational turn” in curating, she has developed exhibitions, residencies, research, and writing at the intersection of art and contemporary social urgencies including migration, gentrification, education, anti-racism, elder care, and Indigeneity. Recent publications include Art + Care: A Future and Studies on a Road. Janna is a founding member of Another Roadmap for Arts Education Network and School, the Micropolitics Research Group, and Precarious Workers Brigade. She is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn is a research-based artist based in Stockholm. Using a broad range of mediums, her artistic practice investigates issues of historicity, collectivity, utopian politics, and multiculturalism within the framework of feminist theories. Nguyễn is the 2017 Audain Visual Artist in Residence at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and will participate in the fourth cycle of NTU Center for Contemporary Art Singapore’s Residencies program.
Precarious Workers Brigade is a UK-based group of precarious workers in culture and education. We call out in solidarity with all those struggling to make a living in this climate of instability and enforced austerity. Our praxis springs from a shared commitment to developing research and actions that are practical, relevant, and easily shared and applied. If putting an end to precarity is the social justice we seek, our political project involves developing tactics, strategies, formats, practices, dispositions, knowledges, and tools for making this happen.
Joshua Vettivelu is an artist working within sculpture, video, performance, and installation. Their work seeks to explore how larger frameworks of power manifest within intimate relationships. Recently, their practice has been examining the tensions that emerge when personal experiences are mined for art production, and how this allows institutions to posture and position themselves as self-reflexive. Vettivelu currently teaches in the Faculty of Continuing Education at OCAD University and is the Director of Programming for Whippersnapper Gallery.
Born in Toronto, Boo Watson began playing and composing music at the age of five, and played in bands for over three decades. In the 1970s she joined the Wages for Housework Campaign and co-founded Wages Due Lesbians. She wrote songs for the movement, many of which were published in Wages for Housework International's Conference Song Book (1975). Watson is a life-long activist working on environmental, feminist, and social justice issues. From 2000–01, Watson organized the only Green Gay Pride in Toronto, powered exclusively by renewable energy. She is now the owner of a hundred-acre art farm, producing organic food, music, theatre, and other arts in Manitoulin Island, Ontario.
Christina Rousseau recently completed her PhD in Humanities at York University. She is currently a sessional instructor in both Canadian Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at Trent University, and is also an independent researcher and writer. Her main teaching, research, and writing interests focus on issues related to social reproduction; gender, the body, and sexuality; gender and work; and social movement organizing.
- Guest Curator
- Helena Reckitt
Helena Reckitt is a curator and critic with a longstanding engagement with histories, and contemporary legacies, of feminist and queer artistic, critical, and political practices. She is editor of the books Art and Feminism, Sanja Ivekovic: Unknown Heroine, and, with Josh Oppenheimer, Acting on AIDS. In 2016, she edited two issues of the Journal of Curatorial Studies with Jennifer Fisher and, in 2015, she worked with six feminist curators and artists to develop Now You Can Go, which explored the transmission and resonance of Italian feminist practices across four London arts venues. Currently Senior Lecturer in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London, she has previously held positions at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (Toronto), Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and the ICA (London).
Letters & Handshakes is a collaboration of Greig de Peuter (Department of Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University) and Christine Shaw (Blackwood Gallery and Department of Visual Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga).
Letters & Handshakes’ past projects include the exhibitions I stood before the source and Precarious: Carole Condé + Karl Beveridge, the forum Fighting Foreclosed Futures: Politics of Student Debt, and the symposium and micropublication Surplus3: Labour and the Digital.
Letters & Handshakes’ past projects include the exhibitions I stood before the source and Precarious: Carole Condé + Karl Beveridge, the forum Fighting Foreclosed Futures: Politics of Student Debt, and the symposium and micropublication Surplus3: Labour and the Digital.
Christine Shaw is Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery and Associate Professor of Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, a Research Fellow & Visiting Scholar in Art, Culture Technology (ACT) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Curatorial Research Fellow, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2021–2023).
Shaw’s work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2019), an exhibition-led inquiry into care, exploring its heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care; The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force exploring the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice; and OPERA-19: An Assembly Sustaining Dreams of the Otherwise (2021–2029), a decentralized polyvocal drama in four acts taking up asymmetrical planetary crisis, differential citizenship, affective planetary attention disorder, and a strategic composition of worlds. She is the founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–ongoing), and co-editor of The Work of Wind: Land (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018) and The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).
Shaw’s work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2019), an exhibition-led inquiry into care, exploring its heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care; The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force exploring the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice; and OPERA-19: An Assembly Sustaining Dreams of the Otherwise (2021–2029), a decentralized polyvocal drama in four acts taking up asymmetrical planetary crisis, differential citizenship, affective planetary attention disorder, and a strategic composition of worlds. She is the founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–ongoing), and co-editor of The Work of Wind: Land (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018) and The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).
Greig de Peuter collaborates on Cultural Workers Organize, an international research project exploring collective responses to precarity in the cultural and creative industries. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. He is a co-founder of Letters & Handshakes.
Greig de Peuter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He researches the contested political economy of media and cultural production, with an emphasis on work, labour, and employment. He is currently collaborating with Enda Brophy and Nicole Cohen on a multi-country study of precarious labour politics in creative industries. His most recent book, co-authored with Nick Dyer-Witheford, is Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His writing has appeared in The Fibreculture Journal, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Cultural Economy, and several anthologies. His article with Cohen and Brophy, “Interns, Unite! (You Have Nothing to Lose—Literally),” received the 2013 Canadian Association of Journalists/Communication Workers of America—Canada Award for Labour Reporting. He has been active in collectively run autonomous education and curatorial projects, including the Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (2005-2010), and Letters & Handshakes (from 2014).
Greig de Peuter is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He researches the contested political economy of media and cultural production, with an emphasis on work, labour, and employment. He is currently collaborating with Enda Brophy and Nicole Cohen on a multi-country study of precarious labour politics in creative industries. His most recent book, co-authored with Nick Dyer-Witheford, is Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His writing has appeared in The Fibreculture Journal, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Cultural Economy, and several anthologies. His article with Cohen and Brophy, “Interns, Unite! (You Have Nothing to Lose—Literally),” received the 2013 Canadian Association of Journalists/Communication Workers of America—Canada Award for Labour Reporting. He has been active in collectively run autonomous education and curatorial projects, including the Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry (2005-2010), and Letters & Handshakes (from 2014).
Design
Matthew Hoffman
Printing
Thistle Printing
Matthew Hoffman
Printing
Thistle Printing
The Blackwood Gallery gratefully acknowledges the operating support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
The Blackwood Gallery is grateful for additional support for Circuit 1: Labour of Curation from the Department of Visual Studies (UTM); Outreach, Conference and Colloquia Fund (Office of the VP Research, UTM); SSHRC-funded research project Cultural Workers Organize; University of Toronto Affinity Partners Manulife, TD Insurance, and MBNA.
Funding for additional staff support was made possible through the Young Canada Works in Heritage Organizations program, Department of Canadian Heritage. The Canadian Museums Association administers the program on behalf of the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Curator Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the invaluable discussions that I have had with artists in the exhibition and thank them for entrusting their work to this project. The feminist artistic methodology of Alex Martinis Roe has been a key resource for the Curating and Caring workshop. The workshop also draws on Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art and Annette Krauss and the Casco Team’s 2014 Site for Unlearning: Art Organization. Jennifer Fisher provided important editorial input for my 2016 essay, “Support Acts: Curating, Caring and Social Reproduction,” which fed into research for the exhibition. Others whose friendship and work have been important sources of inspiration and sustenance include Fulvia Carnevale of Claire Fontaine, Danielle Child, Angela Dimitrakaki, Emma Dowling, Gabby Moser, Susan Kelly, Katy Orkisz, Lara Perry, Jenny Richards, Adrian Searle, and participants in the Feminist Duration Reading Group in London. The support and guidance of Christine Shaw and The Blackwood Gallery team have been exemplary demonstrations of curatorial care.
The Blackwood Gallery is grateful for additional support for Circuit 1: Labour of Curation from the Department of Visual Studies (UTM); Outreach, Conference and Colloquia Fund (Office of the VP Research, UTM); SSHRC-funded research project Cultural Workers Organize; University of Toronto Affinity Partners Manulife, TD Insurance, and MBNA.
Funding for additional staff support was made possible through the Young Canada Works in Heritage Organizations program, Department of Canadian Heritage. The Canadian Museums Association administers the program on behalf of the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Curator Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the invaluable discussions that I have had with artists in the exhibition and thank them for entrusting their work to this project. The feminist artistic methodology of Alex Martinis Roe has been a key resource for the Curating and Caring workshop. The workshop also draws on Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art and Annette Krauss and the Casco Team’s 2014 Site for Unlearning: Art Organization. Jennifer Fisher provided important editorial input for my 2016 essay, “Support Acts: Curating, Caring and Social Reproduction,” which fed into research for the exhibition. Others whose friendship and work have been important sources of inspiration and sustenance include Fulvia Carnevale of Claire Fontaine, Danielle Child, Angela Dimitrakaki, Emma Dowling, Gabby Moser, Susan Kelly, Katy Orkisz, Lara Perry, Jenny Richards, Adrian Searle, and participants in the Feminist Duration Reading Group in London. The support and guidance of Christine Shaw and The Blackwood Gallery team have been exemplary demonstrations of curatorial care.
Labour of Curation
Lisa Busby, Claire Fontaine, Deborah Ligorio, Paul Maheke, Raju Rage, Amie Siegel, Laura Yuile
Micropublication produced on the occasion of Labour of Curation, Circuit 1 of Take Care, September 11–30, 2017.
Featuring a curatorial essay by Helena Reckitt, artist biographies, and full colour illustrations throughout. Edited by Letters & Handshakes.
Free
Micropublication produced on the occasion of Labour of Curation, Circuit 1 of Take Care, September 11–30, 2017.
Featuring a curatorial essay by Helena Reckitt, artist biographies, and full colour illustrations throughout. Edited by Letters & Handshakes.
Free
Download micropublication
pdf
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The Blackwood is situated on the Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat.