Barbara Mahlknecht

Barbara Mahlknecht is a researcher, curator, and art educator. She held the position of Senior Scientist at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2020-2022) and led projects at the Piet Zwart Institute (2017-2019). Among her recent projects are Reviving Feminist Struggles, Growing New Worlds (London, 2024), Mothering Communities (Vienna, 2023), and The Struggle is Not Over (Museum of the 20th Century, Mestre, 2023). As associate curator and editor, she co-organized Hungry for Time with the Raqs Media Collective (Vienna, 2021-2022).

She is currently a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London (AHRC Fellowship).

Exhibition: "Calling on the Archive, Growing New Worlds: Materials for a Feminist Future of Social Reproduction"

This archival installation brings together selected materials—documents, brochures, leaflets, and photographs—highlighting the richness and complexity of women's organizing in the 1970s around the struggle for "wages for housework." Focusing on the Italian context, the documents shed light on the nuances of various aspects such as motherhood, social services, education, and more. Records of conversations, theoretical analyses, communiqués, and strategic reflections trace the paths that led, for example, to the organization of the Mestre demonstration from March 8 to 10, 1974. Finally, posters emphasize the resonances of this campaign with contemporary feminist uprisings such as the Huelga Feminista in Spain and the Women's Strike Assembly in the United Kingdom.