Since 2015, Hana Miletić has worked almost exclusively with hand-produced textiles, developing several ongoing bodies of work that subtly relate forms of historically undervalued labor, like the “women’s work” of weaving, to other narratives of social and economic struggle.

The shaggy, polychrome tapestries of her Felt Workshops (2017–ongoing), for example, are the collective product of a community-oriented social practice in which the artist collaborates with other female-identifying first-generation immigrants to Brussels (Miletić’s home since the early 1990s). Others, like her signature hand-loomed Materials series (2015–ongoing) and a related group of manually manipulated Jacquard woven Softwares (2018–ongoing), are conceived in relation to street photography.

The idiosyncratic sizes, shapes, and colour schemes of the delicate and bright Materials weavings are based on Miletić’s snapshots of stopgap repairs to buildings and other objects in urban public space. The artist’s abiding interest in such provisional interventions stems from her belief they are both “subjective gestures of care” and bellwethers for local issues. Miletić’s first solo show at a US museum premieres several new Materials pieces that relate to maintenance to the List Center building and development in the nearby East Cambridge neighbourhood. These new works are presented alongside a focused selection of recent pieces that attest to her sustained material inquiries into care work, maintenance work, and the shifting relationships between manual labor, reproductive labor, and automation. Soft Services, the exhibition’s title, is a term borrowed from facilities management. As opposed to “hard services” like plumbing and electrical systems, soft services are not permanent parts of a physical structure. Instead, they are provisioned by workers over time, commonly including cleaning, waste management, catering, security, housekeeping, and landscaping. Soft services, a minor (but still essential) category akin to care work and reproductive labor, resonates with the temporary interventions indexed in Miletić’sart. These quotidian repairs to the surface of things, the artist suggests, are a vital practice of inhabiting and shaping a shared world.

Hana Miletić: Soft Services is organised by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator.