Who cares?, 2026
Who cares?, 2026
Installation with live performance (30min)
Scaffolding, wood, textile, paper, domestic objects, food, sound composition, scent
Variable dimensions
Kocka Gallery, Novo Mesto, Slovenia
Scaffolding fills the exhibition space, announcing that work is underway. A mother enters and follows the sound cues. She brews coffee, peels an apple, writes a shopping list, checks the stock, cleans up after others, after herself... The bodies of mothers cycle through in a continuous handover of invisible labour that the artist divides into maintenance, provision, and mental load. A three-part cycle she maintains runs perpetually and remains invisible. This invisible maintenance sustains everything we wish to preserve, and regrettably also the structures it would serve life's quality and justice to discard. Something so fundamental to children, families, businesses, states, and communities is deliberately and entirely devalued, yet resurfaces time and again, quietly summoned and quietly demanded. The devaluation of reproductive labour is, in fact, central to capitalism's survival. Capitalism understands it as a precondition for production, and must remain invisible, unpaid, taken for granted. Federici writes that capitalism "mystifies [this work] as a natural resource or a personal service", whilst capital feeds directly from it being unpaid labour. The deliberately constructed terrain of women's oppression clearly enables capitalism's existence.
Between the scaffolding, the reproduced body is doing reproductive work. The space smells of cleaning products, freshly brewed Turkish coffee and occasionally of warm milk. This is not a domestic reconstruction, not a set. The artist employs spatial and sonic elements as triggers that activate memory and recognition before we can put either into words. In the background runs a repeating sonic composition assembled from fragments of the everyday: alarms, timers, water, keys, children's voices, calls, reminders... The sound creates the rhythm of labour, and occasionally interrupts it, just as the actual work interrupts, reshapes, and constrains each day.
Domestic objects arranged on the scaffolding – buckets, cloths, brooms, cleaning products, knives, apples, coffee pots, cups, papers, pencils, clocks – compose tools that suggest use. The visitor does not observe individual objects but a workstation just vacated and/or about to be activated again. This distinction matters: it presents reproductive labour as a production line. The installation stands as witness to invisible labour, and through the sheer physical presence of the performers, the artist further foregrounds reproductive labour's relationship to the body itself. The performers work in silence throughout. Dressed in identical red overalls and wearing identical wigs, they operate as a dispersed figure. They do not represent three different women, but one body distributed across several locations at once. Kotar Škarjak, as a mother, draws on her own experience of the ambivalence of a body that is simultaneously hers and her child's, there for another's body in a strange entanglement of love and loss of autonomy. Contained within this relationship is one of the exhibition's central tensions: the sense of no way out from the relationships we wish to nurture, and from those we might sometimes wish to leave. Kotar Škarjak's exhibition neither mourns this nor sentimentalises it; instead, it places the tension of these entanglements at the centre of the space and allows it to unfold before everyone's eyes.
Her approach brings to mind McKenzie Wark's recent writing. In the essay A Toast to Femmunism, Wark writes that femmunism doesn't come out to fight fascism on its own terms, but instead creates its own space in coexistence with its own values. Kotar Škarjak is genuine in her relationship to her research material and her play with it. With this exhibition, she does not defend her position, she opens a window into a world that previously existed only for those who already know it.
Care is not distributed at random. It is distributed along gendered lines that the heteronormative structure presents not as a choice but as a natural given. In Who Cares?, Ana Kotar Škarjak is not concerned with exceptions but with the rule: with the dynamic within heteronormative relationships in which one person cares, and another receives that care, without ever having to ask for it, justify it, or notice it.
The artist calls this world the caregiver inhabits a lonely state of being. Not loneliness in the banal sense, but the structural solitude of the one who cares: without a support system, without recognition, without recompense. When a child falls ill in the middle of the night, when schedules need coordinating, when the second shift arrives at the end of the working day, the one at home, in the house, the mother is generally not part of a wider network that might ease this labour. She remains systemically alone. There are, of course, bright exceptions, but they regrettably prove the rule. Federici describes reproductive labour as "the most explosive contradiction of alienated labour", as it comprises activities and relationships that satisfy our deepest needs. Yet, capitalism has transformed them into work we perform rather than live. When the artist makes this labour visible in the gallery space, she offers no solution. She offers a perspective, and that perspective is already, in itself, a political act. The artist asks who receives this perspective.
The reproductive dividend is how I understand the other side of this coin, a term the exhibition advances as a structural question rather than an accusation of any individual. It names what men in heteronormative relationships receive automatically, and as a matter of course: time, space, energy, company, care. By this I do not mean bad partners, but those who passively benefit from the system without truly being aware of it. As the artist puts it: "the collection is made quietly, without a bill."
In her recent writing, Wark revisits what Raewyn Connell had already named: complicit masculinity. In rough translation, complicit masculinity encompasses those who carry the social power to resist hegemonic masculinity, but do not. The system quietly works in their favour too. The artist addresses this viewer directly. She understands that this person, the one who flies under the radar, will inevitably find themselves in the exhibition space. And with all the knowledge and understanding they possess, they will still not understand what they are truly looking at. Understanding requires an experience they have never had. The universal in the artist's world does not mean white, heterosexual, male; it means maternal, caring, feminised. Their non-understanding thus becomes not merely an unfortunate side effect of Who Cares? but its very purpose.
The exhibition does not explain, does not justify, does not offer entry points to those whom the experience of reproductive labour has never touched. It is a space that stands as a monument to those who already know. Those who have been in a kitchen with no way out, alongside others. Who have felt how the body tenses at a child's cry. Who know the lonely state of being not as a concept, but as a Monday morning. In this sense, it is an act of radical inclusion through exclusion. It does not exclude actively, does not reject, does not threaten. It simply does not perform the work that care work always performs: it does not attend to the comfort of those for whom care is self-evident. The reader of this text will perhaps recognise this reversal. The exhibition does not care for the viewer who does not care, and this is a political position that Ana Kotar Škarjak has not proclaimed but has built into the work's very structure. The performance does not explain. The walls do not illustrate. The sound cues do not comment. Everything together works like a smell you cannot name until it catches you off guard. It is the smell of labour you watched all your childhood, and the smell of labour that reached you unawares when you stepped into adult life.
At the end of the performance, we stand alone in the installation. The three performers leave the space one by one, and the work remains unfinished. An apple rests half-peeled, left where the performer abandoned it. A cup of coffee, a bucket, a cloth, a knife, a shopping list remain on the scaffolding as material traces of labour that never truly ends. Completed incompleteness is the only proper form in which reproductive labour can appear, because it knows no end.
Federici writes that the reproduction of human life is the foundation of every economic and political system, and that the enormous quantity of paid and unpaid domestic labour performed by women is what keeps the world in motion. Ana Kotar Škarjak performs these words. Not as an academic claim, but as the starting point for the question the exhibition poses to its visitor:
Who cares? And who even dares to ask?
Tia Čiček