A heavy load: reading domestic work in Ghana through contemporary art and infrastructural critique

Join us for a seminar hosted by the Feminisms Research Group, with speaker Dr Gill Park (Lecturer in Curating and Contemporary Art in the School of Fine Art History of Art and Cultural Studies).

By focusing on the precarious conditions of women head porters (kaya yoo) in Ghana, who migrate south from the rural north to work in markets in the cities of Accra, Kumasi and Takoradi, this ‘work in progress’ talk explores how contemporary art can read and resist the structural violence which shapes the lives of women workers across the globe.

Through the lens of ‘infrastructural critique’ (Vishmidt; Baroni), Dr Gill Park will discuss head portering in Ghana as an example of the gendered labour which sustains capitalist infrastructures. She will also argue that conceptions of progress in Ghana’s major cities depend on narratives which depict women head porters as a social problem, for example as ‘immobile scavengers’ (Demos) or as victims ‘ensnared’ by exploitative practices (DEPA).

Focusing on recent artistic projects by Pieter Hugo and Ibrahim Mahama, which respond to the specificities of modernity in Ghana, this talk will also consider how their work allows us to see the world infrastructurally while also being implicated within the violent infrastructure that their work critiques.

Gill will also ask: can it be possible for contemporary art – with all its baggage – to meaningfully reconfigure infrastructural resources in order to produce sites of creativity and care in everyday life?

About the speaker

Gill Park is a Lecturer in Curating and Contemporary Art the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Her work focuses on women’s work, migratory aesthetics and histories of feminist activism in art.

More information

This event is hosted by the Feminisms Research Group in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. It is free to attend and all are welcome.

If you are interested in joining us, we would be grateful if you would register via this sign up form so we can keep track of numbers.

About the Feminisms Research Group

The Feminisms Research Group is invested in mobilising feminisms to reorient and consider the urgent questions of race, language, sexuality, labour, ecology, embodiment, coloniality and decoloniality.

Image

Installation view Ibrahim Mahama: Zilijifa, The Physical Impossibility of Debt in the Mind of Something Living, 2025; Go Tell it on the Mountain, 2025, Kunsthalle Wien 2025. Courtesy Redclay, Ibrahim Mahama & White Cube, Hong Kong/London/New York/Paris/Seoul. Photo: Markus Wörgötter.