MFA (Master of Filthy Arts) - 2021
© Nadine Bracht
Performance - 80 min
A naked, Black, female* body clothed in a thin layer of see-through trash bags — 80 minutes spent sweeping the floor of the WKV Stuttgart while the annual exhibition of the ABK takes place. Visiting bodies are moving around each other, through the exhibition, repeatedly interrupted by this one body that keeps alternating between states of hyper- and invisibility.
Who is present in this exhibition space? Who is absent?
The performance work “MFA (Master of Filthy Arts)” inserts itself into debates about racism and diversity in German (art)institutional contexts. Positioning itself within the tradition of “maintenance art”, the work points to un(der)paid maintenance work by women* of colour. By intervening directly into the formal, tangible space of the art institution, “MFA” explicitly critiques a patriarchal-colonial subject-object dichotomy which is still very present in mainstream Western institutional art spaces. Thereby the performance prompts these institutions and their visitors to grapple with the historical and systemic backgrounds behind the exclusivity of exhibition spaces.