SHE WORKS ?
Matea Šabić Sabljić
Performative Intervention

Flora Gallery, 8 March 2024

 

 

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With a broom from my own workshop, but also from home, I will clean the Flora Gallery. Using the broom and cleaning water, into which I will, when needed, add a little black acrylic paint, I will inscribe on drawing paper sized 150x200 cm the word: “WORK”. The very act of working will be photo and video documented. Once “WORK” dries, I will place it on the wall of Flora Gallery. Alongside it I will leave the tools: the broom and the bucket with the cleaning water.

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This performative gesture, which I will carry out on 8 March 2024, International Women’s Day – a day that affirms the economic, political, and social achievements of women and advocates for full equality in all segments of society – reflects on the position of women and women artists in a society where domestic, family, and artistic work are still often not perceived or valued as work.

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I use the broom as a tool and medium whose function I once again invert; from a traditionally domestic “female” tool, I first transformed the broom into a boat in response to the provocation of a craftsman who, out of all tools, handed me only a broom. Thus I built, and continue to build, an entire fleet of boats in honor of women who, despite prejudice and prohibitions, sailed the seas, built ships, and explored the maritime world. This time I again use the broom, transforming it into a brush, an artistic tool, with which I inscribe WORK.

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The position of women artists is multiply invisible: domestic labor is attributed to women’s work, historically considered non‑work, socially invisible labor, which implies gender inequality. Analogously, artistic work can also be considered “invisible work,” understood as a personal need or aspiration, and attributed to female identity. In this way, the position of women and women artists is simultaneously a space of value creation and economic exploitation. (Art is Woman – Josipa Bubaš)

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When women’s invisible domestic labor and women’s invisible artistic labor are multiplied by the invisibility of women throughout history, we arrive at a precarious social position. Through the artistic act I invert this, inscribing–drawing–underlining–working > work, posing and answering the rhetorical question: is domestic labor, is artistic labor, work or non‑work — in other words, does she work?

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Matea Šabić Sabljić