Care, Custodianship & Collectivity is a programme of online talks and events at NN Contemporary Art, addressing the intensifying crisis of care. 

This series takes the logic of care as its starting point and explores various approaches, debates and perspectives to expand our understanding of what the term can mean for cultural practice. Our discussions will depart from the recognition of care as an interpersonal experience between people, things and situations, but it will be also examined as a public matter and struggle concerned with exclusions and critiques. 

While NN Contemporary Art is rethinking its social role as a cultural institution, it is essential to explore how care can become a foundation for curatorial practices which prioritise sharing resources, opening up education, imagining new economies, future societies and ecologies. These online gatherings, guided by invited speakers, will consider caring as a social and material practice, a force that opens up to new possibilities of thinking, feeling and being in the world. 

This programme emerged as a response to the transformative events of the last year, which revealed that contemporary societies rely on care labour and practices to survive. Care is necessary to all aspects of life, yet under constant threat, through late capitalism’s austerity politics prioritising immediate, quantifiable gain over qualitative, long-term social welfare.

At a time of separation and fragmentation across communities, the conversations in this series will help rethink collective practices and coming together. Can a better understanding of our shared vulnerability, interconnectedness and mutual dependency help us rethink how we can care for and with each other?