ABSTRACT
Usha Seejarim's travelling exhibition, Venus at Home, engaged with the theme of domestic labour and its impact on women's lives. Suggesting that the show was informed by intersectional feminist thought, Brenda Schmahmann indicates that it was underpinned by recognition of the ways in which South African women's experiences of domestic work have been configured through the impact of colonial and apartheid histories. She proposes that the making of the Venus at Home can be understood in the light of designer Paula Scher's concept of “serious play”. Constituted from donated domestic items such as brooms, mops and irons that retained their integrity as objects, the works comprising the exhibition invoked ironical reference to engagements with the “readymade” by male modernist from the West. Through these references, Venus at Home offered a critique of not only gendered constructs about work in the home being of lesser value than that produced for money but also how race and geography inform principles of valuing creative work.
