Care can be defined as a set of relational practices that foster mutual recognition, growth, protection, empowerment, and human community, among others (Gordon et al., 1996). This study investigates the practices of care in the context of the curatorial creation of collaborative arts engagements. The recent proliferation of partnerships between artists and communities has revealed that, in some instances, such relationships have not been productive or supportive. This raises questions about how curators and artists embed ethical commitments into their planning and whether their relational practices foster care. Informed by Ethics of Care theory, Relational Aesthetics, and feminist scholarship as derived from the fields of leadership, psychology, and higher education, an interview-based cross-case approach was utilized to examine the Ethics of Care praxis within participatory art engagements. Six art practitioners were interviewed for this study to reveal their common experiences relating to care and explore how this relates to the background and curatorial work of the researcher. Data were collected through interviews and the researchers’ photographic reflection journal. It is argued that the findings expand the definition of ethical, collaborative relations within artistic co-creations. They also highlight the need to embrace discomfort, set boundaries to inform reciprocity, and provide a sense of belonging within Holistic Communities of Practitioners.

This dissertation considers the ways that artistic collectives have become legible and value-producing social forms as they circulate within the institutions and economic geographies of contemporary art. My project focuses on Slavs and Tatars, a multilingual artist collective that began as a geographically dispersed reading group in 2006, and has been based in Berlin since 2014. I highlight the aesthetic, semiotic, and infrastructural dimensions of their practice and its modes and forms of production. I position the group as a lens through which to analyze the language and labor of knowledge production across economic geographies of contemporary art, the value projects of the German cultural state, migration and mobility politics, and the tensions of 'multicultural' Berlin. The design of the dissertation reflects two strategic methods. First, I instrumentalize the mobility of the collective in order to better understand the structural interdependencies across scalar geographies of cultural value. Second, I bring attention to Slavs and Tatars' linguistic and discursive practices, and the aesthetic forms these produce. Across the arc of the dissertation, I analyze how Slavs and Tatars is discursively produced, and thus mobilized through the spaces and public contexts of contemporary art. Each chapter discusses a distinct instance of the collective's circulation, semiotic practice, and the entailments of value that emerge across the situated publics and economic geographies of contemporary art: from translation and exhibition projects that engage the collective's conceptual region of Eurasia, to the linguistic infrastructures of studio practice in Berlin's Moabit neighborhood; from a lecture performance at renowned public institution Haus der Kulturen der Welt, to the circulation of books in market, gallery, and exhibition contexts. I analyze these forms in contexts of their public circulation in order to understand the effects of semiotic labor in the production of cultural value. I chart how semiotic practices of the collective productively engage economies of global art and state cultural funding—indexing place and social identity to derive value from a liberal politics of representation, on the one hand—while fostering emergent counterpublics through knowledge production on the other. Strategic language practices work to shift the accumulation and redistribution of material resources to artistic collectives and social projects throughout their region. I argue that this moves away from a politics of art that contests the state on ideological grounds, to one that engages regional, state, and municipal cultural economies in an effort to redistribute social capital and material resources. The dissertation puts forward a model for theorizing the political and economic geographies of contemporary art and culture, and the semiotic practices through which value, resources, attention, and meaning are made redistributable.