Contact Traces

Featuring works by Derya Akay, Lenka Clayton, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ilana Harris-Babou, and Jenny Kendler

Care is difficult to define. Acts of caring for the physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing of ourselves and others can be variably contradictory: quotidian, yet revolutionary; selfish, yet virtuous; obligatory, yet emancipatory. In this past year, the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for social and racial justice, and the ongoing climate crisis have brought care’s urgency and significance to light. As a result, inevitable questions have surfaced: Is acknowledging our interdependence sufficient? Do the blurred lines of reciprocity offer something more? Contact Traces emerges from a year wherein support systems have failed or fallen horribly short of expectations. In the wake of these failures, caregiving is exposed as a vital web of interrelations on which individual and collective survival depend.

The artists in Contact Traces question assumptions of care as an act of benevolence. Their works suggest that individuals can disrupt the systems that do not recognize the value or labor of uncompensated care by spotlighting the process of caregiving and its messy aftermath. As we work toward a post-pandemic world, Contact Traces cries out against a “return to normal,” suggesting that a society in which care is fully recognized could be more just and sustainable.