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Mothering
Group exhibition curated by Penelope Kupfer -
Mothering is not just a moment in time.
Mothering is ancestral, ambivalent, unstructural.
Mothering is all of us.It is when motherhood becomes a ready-made mantle that mothers are turned into their own ghosts. Yet, when open to its full range of possibilities, mothering is a fertile ground, a plentiful soil from which a multiplication of ideas and actions can flourish, including meditations on and responses to issues of freedom, desire, heritage, interdependence, inequality, hope, care, power, planetary health, reproduction rights, and choice.
Mothering is a collective investigation into motherhood that embraces a heterogeneous and intersectional definition of mother. It welcomes the fantasies, struggles, dreams, longings, and concerns that (r)evolve around the many ideas and images of motherhood.
You can access the public programme viewing room here. -
Installation views
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Artists
Featured artists include Mogli Saura, a trans mother, whose video The Skin is the Deepest (2022) documents an intimate and moving dialogue between the artist and her mother. -
Artists participating in the show also include Bruno Baptistelli, a father-to-be whose practice focuses on the relationship between people and space; Willy Nabi, a London-based artist whose life-sculptures play with the idea of the “mummy”, both as a reference to his late mother and his Egyptian heritage; and Lize Bartelli, a painter who reckons with her desire to be a mother as a way of demystifying womanhood.
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Bruno Baptistelli, Mãe, 2020
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Reflecting the exhibition’s all-embracing notion of motherhood, the 12 artist mothers in the show drawn inspiration from a multitude of personal and shared aspects of being a mother. Ingrid Berthon-Moine, Penelope Kupfer and Harriette Meynell examine the idea of maternal expectation and failing, using video, painting and installation, respectively.
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Ingrid Berthon-Moine, Ma, 2009
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Harriette Meynell, Playing House (Redacted), 2022
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Artists Magda Bielesz and Joey Bryniarska welcome their children into their work, whilst Hoa Dung Clerget’s set of gold-nippled breasts in Please Touch (2022) evokes the age-old taboo of breastfeeding.
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Magda Bielesz, Lines, 2019
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Ancestral female symbology is the raw material behind the work of Thalita Hamaoui, LaTosha Monique, Lucia Pizzani and Maria Konder.
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Mothering is an invitation to dream, negotiate and expand the horizons of the possible by reflecting on how to discard and unlearn social structures that exclude and undermine mothers and motherhood. It rejects the deep-seated constraints that define the institution of motherhood, whilst openly and bravely embodying mothering as creative and radical potential.
Please click here to read the artist bios.
