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A view from the "Kitchen". Resources for Re-Imagining Possible Futures

28 August - 5 September 2018

Based on her ongoing research, Barbara Mahlknecht will investigate the relations of the organization, infrastructure, maintenance and care within the specific context of Vessel Art Project from a feminist viewpoint. The aim of her residency is to contribute to the question of how to (re-)institute, (re-)organize, (re-)produce and maintain the material and immaterial structure of an art project, also in the light of its specific locality at the Mediterranean sea.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, feminist politics scrutinized the central role of housework (respectively the reproduction of labor-power) for the accumulation of capital. By drawing on these historical, but also on contemporary feminist struggles on care work, Mahlknecht will contribute to the process of collective and collaborative investigation to re-imagine Vessel’s future organizational structures.
For this aim, she proposes the metaphor of the "kitchen" as a material site of reproduction and "nourishment": How to re-imagine, re-organize, re-structure, make visible disregarded relations of quotidian tasks of reproduction, care and maintenance that take shape within a particular art and curatorial space?
How to re-think the external and internal material and immaterial relations of Vessel Art Project on the basis of feminist economics, and practices of maintenance and care? And how to re-imagine its possible futures from the viewpoint of the "kitchen"?

BIO

Barbara Mahlknecht is a researcher, curator, teacher, and art educator.
Her current work focuses on the intertwining of the practices of curating, social reproduction and feminist theory; on critical perspectives on the regimes of art education in relation to ideology and totalitarianism as well as on questions of (un-)translatability and re-enactment.
Recently, she has curated, among others: Scripting Prophecies, Part I (Goldsmiths College, University of London, symposium contribution 2017, with Giulia Damiani and Teresa Calonje); Turning (to) the Archive. Institutional Histories, Educational Regimes, Artistic Practices, and the Politics of Remembrance (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2016, exhibition and conference, with Elke Krasny).
She is a researcher and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and works on her PhD in Curating at the Goldsmiths College, University of London.