Elke Krasny | Ways of Seeing Care: Feminist Histories of Art

Faculty of Humanities will host a lecture by dr. Elke Krasny under the name Ways of Seeing Care: Feminist Histories of Art. Everyone interested in feminism and art is cordially invited to attend. The lecture is organized by the Department of Theory of Art and Artworks.

Lecture abstract:

Building on John Berger’s seminal claim in Ways of Seeing that seeing—and therefore understanding—is never neutral but socially and politically constituted, this lecture examines the visual politics of care. It argues that the hegemonic feminist diagnosis of the invisibilization of care work and social reproduction under capitalist colonial patriarchy has, paradoxically, diverted sustained attention from the material and representational regimes through which care has also been made visible, staged, and spatially organized. By foregrounding these regimes, the lecture interrogates the epistemic effects of such material–discursive formations and the ways they shape what care can be, look like, and mean.

The lecture further asks how feminist histories of art—both as critical inquiries into art and as sustained engagements with feminist artistic practices—open up alternative ways of seeing care. This entails a critical examination of the visual codifications that have produced and naturalized specific ideologies, religious belief systems, mammalian epistemologies, and economies of exploitation and extraction. At the same time, it traces feminist visual genealogies of care and social reproduction in the arts, highlighting how artistic practices have contested dominant representations and articulated other imaginaries of interdependence, labor, and collective life.

About the lecturer:

Dr. Elke Krasny is Professor the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her research and her curatorial work interrogates the intersections of care, social reproduction, and dimensions of social, ecological and epistemic justice as well as politics of memory in contemporary art and architecture. In recognition of her contributions to feminist research, she was awarded the Gabriele Possanner State Prize in 2023. Her major publications include Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (with Angelika Fitz, MIT Press, 2019), Living with an Infected Planet: Covid-19, Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care (transcript, 2023), Curating with Care (Routledge 2023) and Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge 2023) both with Lara Perry Feminist Infrastructural Critique (with Sophie Lingg and Claudia Lomoschitz, 2024), for further information, see FKW Journal, and Abundance not Capital. The Lively Architecture of Anupama Kundoo (with Angelika Fitz, MIT Press 2025).

Pozvánka: MSc. Denisa Tomková, Ph.D.