Ways of Seeing Care: Open Lecture with Elke Krasny

The lecture will take place at Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus.

Food will be available on a voluntary contribution basis.

Registration at anmalan@medborgarhuset.se  

Building on John Berger’s seminal claim in Ways of Seeing that seeing—and understanding—is never simply given or neutral, but socially and politically constituted, this lecture examines the visual politics of care. Arguing that the hegemonic feminist diagnosis of the invisibilization of care work within capitalist colonial patriarchy has inadvertently obscured sustained analysis of the material and representational regimes through which care has been rendered visible, staged, and spatially organized, the lecture interrogates the epistemic effects of such material–discursive formations. It asks how specific visual and spatial codifications of care produce, stabilize, and naturalize particular ideologies, religious belief systems, mammalian epistemologies, and economies of exploitation and extraction, and how these formations participate in organizing and making sense of social reproduction. Articulating a feminist critique of ways of seeing care becomes a way of seeing—and enacting—care otherwise.

About Elke Kresny:

Elke Krasny, PhD, Professor for Art and Education and Head of the Art and Education Program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author. Her scholarship and her international lectures address ecological and social justice at the global present with a focus on caring practices in architecture, urbanism, curatorial work, and contemporary art.

In 2011, Krasny received the Outstanding Artist Award – Women’s Culture. Together with Urska Jurman, she initiated Ecologies of Care. The 2019 exhibition and edited volume Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, curated and edited together with Angelika Fitz, was published by MIT Press and introduces a care perspective in architecture addressing the anthropogenic conditions of the global present. Together with Angelika Fitz and Marvi Mazhar, she edited the book Yasmeen Lari. Architecture for the Future (MIT Press, 2023) Her book Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19, Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care introduces feminist worry and feminist hope in order then to develop a feminist cultural theory on pandemic frontline ontologies and feminist recovery plans.