Cleaning Conditions

Manchester Art Gallery, UK 2021

Lacy premiered a new film of her 2013 project Cleaning Conditions at the Manchester Art Gallery.  This installation places Ford Madox Brown’s painting Work 1852-65  alongside a film by Victoria Dahl and Leanne Judge which documents a two-week performance in July 2013 at Manchester Art Gallery for do it, an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist for the Manchester International  Festival. A team of volunteer ‘sweepers’ from labor, living wage and  immigration organizations swept the Gallery floors every day, pausing at  the end of the cleaning for a conversation on current labor conditions  throughout England. An homage to her mentor, American performance artist  Allan Kaprow, Lacy created a political conversation appropriate to the UK at that time in response to Kaprow’s 1995 text Chores:

Sweeping the dust from the floor of a room,

Spreading the dust in another room

So it won’t be noticed

Continuing daily.

In addition to the filmed conversations with leaders of various migrant women and labor rights group leaders across England, staged in front of the Ford Maddox Brown painting “Work,” the project also included two collective conversations with cross-positional museum staff members, from executives to cleaners,  about the role of work in their own lives.

Cleaning Conditions ran from June 2021-September 2022. This exhibition was included the first Uncertain Futures Project: The Interviews. See that installation here.