Encompassing a five-part exhibition series, performances, publications, and workshops, Take Care follows a 2016 group exhibition, curated by Letters & Handshakes, at the Blackwood Gallery. That exhibition, I stood before the source, featured artists confronting the aesthetic problem of representing contemporary capitalism, and concluded with this impulse: to imagine a “shift from the metrics of accumulation to the requirements of care as an ordering principle of social relations.”11Letters & Handshakes, “I stood before the source,” I stood before the source (Mississauga: Blackwood Gallery, 2016), 32. Immediately, however, this statement encounters the “crisis of care,”22Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” in New Left Review 100 (2016): 99-117, and “Capitalism’s Crisis of Care: A Conversation with Nancy Fraser,” in Dissent Fall (2016): 30-37. the problematic within, against, and beyond which Take Care mobilizes more than 100 artists, activists, curators, and researchers.

Anatomizing the crisis of care and its systemic underpinnings, Take Care pushes back against both the low cultural visibility of care work and the prevailing extractivist attitude toward care, which, as Nancy Fraser puts it, treats care, like nature, as a free, infinite resource—a logic to which this project’s title signals.33Fraser, “Capitalism’s Crisis of Care,” 91. Rather than take care for granted, we embark on this project as a transdisciplinary inquiry into care, setting out to explore care’s heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care. Although we strive to elevate care, the intention is not to position care as a cure or panacea or even as benign: care involves relations of power in which concern and control, empathy and exhaustion, dependence and interdependence, the systemic and the intimate, responsibility and obligation are entangled.

The exhibition series’ political proposition, kept in play throughout, pivots on care as a possible nodal point among actions, struggles, and visions that “re-place” care “as an arche of human existence and of social relations.”44Precarias a la Deriva, “A Very Careful Strike - Four Hypotheses,” trans. Franco Ingrassia and Nate Holdren, in The Commoner, no. 11 (2006): 41. In its organizing strategies, Take Care strives to take on the challenges posed by its program: to rethink affective dimensions of (curatorial) labour; decentre individual authorship; profile radical communities of care; reallocate cultural and institutional resources; cut through apathy and empathy; practice collective resiliency; respect existing initiatives and historical precedents; and generate new bonds. Take Care is, in short, a connective project.

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The exhibitions, performances, publications, and workshops comprising Take Care are organized around five circuits of care:

September 11–30, 2017
Recalling the etymology of curate (curare: “to take care of”), Labour of Curation views cultures of work and interaction in art institutions through a care lens, and reflects on art’s implication in, rather than detached observation of, the crisis of care.

Habits of Care
Curated by Helena Reckitt
Lisa Busby, Claire Fontaine, Deborah Ligorio, Paul Maheke, Raju Rage, Amie Siegel, Laura Yuile

October 16–November 4, 2017
Traversing care as a social gesture, a job, and a political site, Care Work presents counter-narratives of the provision of care, care workers’ struggles, and caring labour’s transformation through colonialism, marketization, migration, and technology.

k.g. Guttman, Hands become Ears

Marisa Morán Jahn (Studio REV-), CareForce

Kwentong Bayan Collective (Althea Balmes + Jo SiMalaya Alcampo), In Love and Struggle

Onaman Collective, Land and Water Protectors

The Let Down Reflex
Curated by Amber Berson and Juliana Driever
Lise Haller Baggesen & Deirdre M. Donoghue, Cevan Castle, Dillon de Give, Home Affairs with Ozlem Ozkal, Leisure, LoVid, Jacqueline Hoáng Nguyễn, Shani K Parsons, Kerri-Lynn Reeves, Shane Aslan Selzer

November 20–December 9, 2017
Infrastructures and Aesthetics of Mutual Aid turns to support structures and collaborative practices beyond institutional spaces that are conventionally associated with care, such as hospitals and long-term residential care facilities, to consider care as a disposition, a system of reciprocity, a radical act, and an elusive goal within communities of art and activism alert to the challenge of sustainability.

The Sustenance Rite
Curated by Lauren Fournier
Anthea Black, Thirza Cuthand, Erika DeFreitas, Petrina Ng, Zoë Schneider, Kara Stone, Evan Tyler, Justice Walz, Jessica Lynn Whitbread

Radiodress, MKV: Credit River Immersion

Circo Zero, Turbulence (a dance about the economy)

January 8–27, 2018
Stewardship decentres the isolated individual as the privileged recipient or scene of care, and forefronts “epistemically-diverse” conceptions and collective practices of care that centre upon relationships to land, territory, and nonhumans.

#callresponse
Curated by Tarah Hogue, Maria Hupfield, and Tania Willard
Christi Belcourt, Marcia Crosby, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Isaac Murdoch, Esther Neff and IV Castellanos, Tanya Tagaq, Tania Willard, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory

February 12–March 11, 2018
Engaging spaces of the welfare state as contested sites of differentially distributed care, Collective Welfare confronts tensions between institutional bounds and autonomous practices of denying, circulating, or centring care in social relations.

Steven Eastwood, The Interval and the Instant

Sheena Hoszko, Correctional Service Canada Accommodation Guidelines: Mental Healthcare Facility

Carolyn Lazard, In Sickness and Study