Worlding Love, Gender, and Care

Shigeko Kubotas pioneering video Sexual Healing (1998) presents an ambivalent take on her disabled husband Nam June Paik in physical therapy. Accompanied by Marvin Gayes titular pop song, it considers love, sex, and care in old age within the much-debated field of Fluxus collaborations, and its ideal of working together as equals when fusing life and art. Worlding Love, Gender, and Care delves into the four decades of Kubota and Paiks time together, reflects on feminist worlding, and investigates the vital contribution of female Fluxus artists to art history.

Franziska Koch is an art historian and Lecturer of Transcultural Studies at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. Her habilitation project about Nam June Paik and transcultural collaboration in Fluxus is supported by a grant from the Baden-Württemberg Foundation. She co-edited Negotiating Difference: Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context (2012) and is the author of Die 'chinesische Avantgarde' und das Dispositiv der Ausstellung (2016). More recently, she edited How We Work Together: Ethics, Histories, and Epistemologies of Artistic Collaboration, a themed issue of the Journal of Transcultural Studies (2020/21). She co-leads the Heidelberg team of the Trans-Atlantic Research Project 'Worlding Public Cultures: the Arts and Social Innovation' (2019-2023; BMBF/DLR).