Description:Q6364

The Disoeuvre: a definition in progress

People positioned as marginal to art’s production must work socially and institutionally, as well as in the studio, not only to make work, but to change existing structures so that their work can be recognised and critically received as art. Rather than disregarding those whose conventional oeuvre seems interrupted and inconsistent, we should look for artistic consistency in an artist’s work made in and beyond the studio, through employment at art’s institutions, or connected, for instance, to the labour of care, activism and other social practices.

As a critical tool, the Disoeuvre takes account of artists’ training in adaptability and their working lives across different sites. It responds to practices persisting through ‘feminised’ labour (as maintenance or precarity), domestic instability, transience of documentation, new recognition for overlooked visual activisms and curatorial strategies, archival gaps and is open to more.