Elke Krasny: Dirty Laundry: Washing the World - online přednáška v Galerii VI PER

The lecture Dirty Laundry offers a feminist reassessment of spaces and care work by foregrounding their bodily and infrastructural dimensions. It perceives laundry not just as a form of domestic work, but also as a physical place, and approaches them with a critical lens through which one can examine gendered and racialized histories rooted in colonialism, capitalism, and both public and intimate forms of bodily labor. Based on queer-feminist spatial analysis, materialist feminism, and social reproduction theory, Dirty Laundry investigates what it means to "wash the world." Following François Vergès's analysis in the book Making the World Clean, it emphasizes how everyday tasks associated with cleaning reveal broader social, political, and spatial relations. In art and architecture, the concept of critical laundry will be presented through selected examples, including "Laundry Works" (1977) by Mother Art Collective, "I Know I Care" (2019) by Jelena Micić, or "La Ropa Sucia se Lava en Casa" (2022) by Tatiana Bilbao.
Dr. Elke Krasny is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her research and curatorial work address intersections between care, social reproduction, and dimensions of social, ecological, and epistemic justice, as well as transnational feminist activism and memory politics in contemporary art and architecture. For her contributions to feminist research, she was awarded the State Prize for Gabriele Possanner in 2023. Her most significant publications include Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (co-authored 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 co-authored with Lara Perry, Feminist Infrastructural Critique (co-authored with Sophie Lingg and Claudia Lomoschitz, 2024); more information can be found in FKW Journal and in the book Abundance not Capital: The Lively Architecture of Anupama Kundoo (co-authored with Angelika Fitz, MIT Press 2025).
The event will take place online, and registration is required.
The event is part of the accompanying program for the exhibition Home Discomforts.