SHOP
In her work, Kanishka Kanishka, confronts and forms linkages between the themes of techno-optimism, domestic labor, capitalism, and feminism. The artist is drawn to the ubiquitous, mysterious, gendered, ambiguous, and invisible nature of labor. She engages with her personal archive and investigates the elements in her mother’s images, such as the pose, milieu, and other visible objects. Kanishka strives to express the generational effects of her relationship with domestic labor by dismantling the power structures that dominate her personal archive.
In ‘The Oikos of the Earth, the Nomos of the Black Hole’, Antonia Majaca explains: A 1958 book by Hannah Arendt, titled The Human Condition, was highly influential in the consolidation of this new rational Subject of liberal humanism. In this text, Arendt takes up the distinction between handeln (praxis) and herstellen (poiesis) and develops the character of these activities on the basis of the ancient city-state (polis) as it appears in Aristotle’s Politics. Handeln takes place in the public sphere of the polis, while herstellen and arbeiten (work) belong to the sphere of the private economy—the space of unproductive labor, the space of social reproduction, the ancient oikos. The strict separation between the private and public spheres ensures that the material constraints and necessities of organic life are kept out of the public sphere and that the polis can therefore be a meeting place for “free and equal people” to exercise their right to “the political” in a transparent, frictionless space of rationality.
Kanishka proposes to rethink this dissociation and question the production of activity, knowledge, and ordered structure of the polis. Her works when placed together begin to create their own networks and relationships. The artist reflects - If such relationships are explored, can they be revolutionary? If everything under the sun is part of a capitalist factory, do we need to assess the tasks we perform for the love of others and self? As Bertolt Brecht said, “The movements of the stars have become clearer; but to the mass of the people the movements of their masters are still incalculable.”
These photographs invite us to think past the obvious ecosystems of labor.