ART AS LABOUR – Motherhood as institutional critique. 

Discourse format and publication within the framework of “Care City”, Miracles of the Prairie 2021, Mannheim. 

At the end of the 1960s, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles had to learn that being an artist and being a mother were considered two mutually exclusive ways of being on the free art market. 

Over fifty years later, Ukele's critique remains relevant: Artists who are also mothers are seen as unreliable and less resilient, a risk to production processes. What would an art institution have to look like that places reproduction rather than production at the center of its understanding of art? How can motherhood and care work be made visible in the art world? How can strategies of maintenance be countered to the neoliberal forms of production in the art industry? 

Eleonora Herder and Inga Bendukat from Anpartnersincrime Together with accomplices from art, activism and theory, we invited people to discuss, update and rewrite the "Manifesto for Maintenance Art" and to put forward new demands for the compatibility of care work and art.

With inputs from Marcia Breuer (artist and initiator of »More Mothers for Art«), Hannah Cooke (artist), Katrin Hylla (director and co-author of the 2018 Care Manifesto), Magdalena Kallenberger (member of MATERNAL FANTASIES), Olivia Hyunsin Kim (performer and director), Mary Jirmanus Saba (filmmaker and geographer, co-author of »Why Call It Labor?«).

The publication created during the academy is available Download here.