Introduction: Capital, gender and the work of art: an intervention of, and in, materialist feminism1. Feminist politics and art history: from ‘postmodernism’ to ‘global capitalism’2. The gender issue: lessons from post-socialist Europe3. Travel as (gendered) work: global space, mobility and the ‘woman artist’4. Gendered economies and knowledge production: Ursula Biemann’s video essays and materialist feminism for the twenty-first century5. Masculinity and the economic subject in contemporary art6. Acting on power: critical collectives, curatorial visions and art as lifePostscript: what is a feminist beginning?BibliographyIndex

Is gender implicated in how art does its work, or is defined as work, in global space? Is a global imperative exclusive to capitalism’s planetary expansion or does it also animate oppositional practices in art and curating? And what is new in the gendered paradigms of art after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a persistently divided Europe and elsewhere? Angela Dimitrakaki addresses these questions in an insightful and highly original analysis of travel as artistic labour, the sexualisation of migration as a relationship between Eastern and Western Europe, the post-documentary aesthetic of the feminist video essay, the rise of female art and curatorial collectives, the spectral re-appearance of the male working class in the museum and globalisation’s ‘bad boys’. A central aspiration of the book is to demonstrate that contemporary art and theory’s turn to labour and economic relations, around 2000, compels a reviewing of feminism’s attachment to the cultural subject, practices and methodologies privileged by postmodernism. Artists and collectives discussed in the book include, among others, Marina Abramovic, Ursula Biemann, Tracey Emin, Andrea Fraser, Kuratorisk Action, Lin+Lam, Malmö Free University for Women (MFK), Jenny Marketou, Renzo Martens, Dani Marti, Steve McQueen, Mujeres Públicas, Tanja Ostojic, Ann-Sofi Sidén, Mare Tralla, WHW and Artur Zmijewski. This is a theoretically astute overview of key developments in art and its contexts since the 1990s and the first study to attempt a critical refocusing of feminist politics in art history in the wake of globalisation as capitalism’s biopolitical arena. It will appeal be essential reading in art history, gender, feminist and globalisation studies, curatorial theory, cultural studies and beyond.