Every system is built around the promise of protection. The most revealing moments are often the ones when that promise breaks.

This section examine the structures that organise everyday life: law, healthcare, politics, public institutions and social expectations. Instead of care as an emotion, this chapter looks at care as a system—one that can exclude, isolate, control or fail.

These works emerge from different realities but return to the same question: who is protected, who is ignored, and whose body carries the consequences? The inability to touch during the pandemic, the fight for reproductive rights, invisible pain and the celebration of power over vulnerability reveal care as something deeply political rather than neutral.

Painting, textile and installation become tools for exposing what usually remains hidden. Individual experiences point towards larger structures, where personal stories become evidence of collective conditions.

Systems of Care brings together works that question the institutions designed to protect life, revealing the fragile distance between the idea of care and the systems that shape it.