MAINTENANCE ARTIST

What if housework became an art form?

In the 1970s, after the birth of her child, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles sees domestic chores consuming her creative work. Refusing to be reduced to daily labour, she turns these alienating tasks into art. From her own home to New York’s Department of Sanitation, where she becomes its first artist-in-residence, Ukeles brings invisible labour into the art world. Through previously unseen archival footage and spectacular actions, including her ballet of garbage trucks, Toby Perl Freilich brings to life a joyful and subversive body of work — and pays tribute to those who keep the world running, largely unnoticed and rarely appreciated.