What happens to art when ‘capitalist life’ succeeds ‘globalisation’ as the route into understanding the world? This book interrogates how artists negotiate the most pressing issues of the early 21st century from class, climate and the legacies of colonialism, to housing and healthcare. Feminist analyses of capitalism – specifically social reproduction perspectives – are used to unpack works by Ultra-red, Melanie Gilligan, Alberta Whittle, Olivia Plender and Martha Rosler that attend to the scaffolding and shadows of the formal economy. Radically updating the literature on art’s documentary turn, the book offers an original analysis of the ways in which representational strategies which document life interact with durational, interventionist artworks, made in collaboration with communities. In doing so, it transforms our understanding of contemporary art and explains why artists place such emphasis on the material, lived experience of capitalist life in all its hidden, complex and tangled aspects.