Milijana Babić and the Centre for Women's Studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka: 3rd Shift

2019–2020, art project presented as a magazine and a billboard in public space

The 3rd Shift project questions the relations between the terms body – work – beauty – woman from the perspective of the so-called “third shift” of women’s labour. In this sense, the syntagma relates to what we call self-fashioning or the “reparation” of the female body with the aim of reaching the beauty ideal proposed by hegemonic visual and material culture. Connecting the idea of labour to that of free time, the “third shift” becomes the focal point for observing the two traditional shifts of women’s labour, the paid and the unpaid (housework and carework), the public and the private, influencing the entirety of labour aspects of women’s lives.

The work is presented in Ljubljana in the form of a public billboard and a publication simulating a women’s magazine. It is based on interviews with about sixty women who talked to researchers while undergoing various beauty treatments in Rijeka’s beauty parlours in 2019. The women shared their experiences and revealed their relation to their own appearance, along with the amount of time, money and energy they invest in their body and outer appearance. The work was conceptualised as an intervention (insert) in the women's glossy magazine Gloria Glam (distributed in Croatia, February 2020, print run 10,000).

Graphic design: Ana Tomić, Marino Krstačić-Furić; photo and styling: Doris Fatur; production: Drugo more; in the framework of Dopolavoro flagship of the Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture. The billboard production was supported by Europlakat.

The Corneous Stories exhibition programme features a talk with Milijana Babić and Ana Ajduković (Centre for Women's Studies) entitled the 3rd Shift: The Whole Circle of an Artistic Process.