Politics of Care

With the global coronavirus pandemic having upended life as we know it, new light has been shed on the importance of care, both societally and in our personal relationships. Society is upheld by reproductive labour; we depend on the critical support of care workers, just as we rely on the care of those closest to us. The present crisis has conferred new visibility to the webs of interdependency that exist between us, while also exposing how those webs have grown fragile. The survival of life on Earth depends on the webs of interdependency that unite not only people, but all beings, both animate and inanimate.

Selected from HAM’s collection of 200 works of media art, this compilation of nine videos can be approached through such a concept of care. They remind us how humans exist in a state of interdependency, inseparable from and reliant on others for nourishment and oxygen, and how every action taken has consequences that extend beyond the individual body.

Care is itself a contradictory concept that should be “handled with care”. Care and its various manifestations – be they organized forms of communal activism or public care funded by the welfare state – are never born within a vacuum. What to our knowledge and understanding constitutes “taking good care” of others and the environment is ultimately defined by a massive apparatus of knowledge production that is premised upon a specific and localized social and political framework.