Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form

A group exhibition examining the vexed relationships between art, labor, debt, and dependency. The artists in Performing Conditions engage many landscapes of labor: plantations and museums, hospitals and factories, studios and households. But their artworks could all be said to refuse the myth of art’s autonomy: its putative freedom from history, politics, and the social conditions of its making. Instead, they dramatize art’s networks of debt and dependency, two terms that resonate across the porous boundaries of Marxism, the Black radical tradition, socialist feminism, and disability studies.