Exhibition BIOWOMAN_REPRODUCTION Automatic translate
с 1 Июня
по 20 ИюляТворческий кластер “АРТМУЗА”
Васильевский остров, 13 линия, д.70
Санкт-Петербург
30 artists from Russia, Germany, France and the USA will present their experiences of motherhood, pregnancy and childbirth. At the opening, the well-known Petersburg artist and philosopher Alla Mitrofanova will make a presentation on “Motherhood in Feminist Art”.
The BIOWOMAN project was launched in St. Petersburg in 2013, after which the exhibitions were held in Remscheid and Cologne (Germany), Jerusalem (Israel) and Brooklyn (USA). Only women participate in it. The goal of the project is to popularize the independent creativity of artists from around the world, to provide women with the opportunity to express art on any relevant topics, regardless of the current state of the art market, age, reputation and place of residence of the authors.
The seventh exhibition of the project is dedicated to the "reproductive labor" of women - pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood.
In modern art, there is practically no tradition of depicting pregnancy and childbirth - this most important process of human reproduction and a specific female mission on Earth.
The images of pregnant women and women in labor that used to be in the past, as a rule, were of a technical or religious nature (training aids for doctors, cave paintings, reliefs and sculptures depicting goddesses of fertility cults in ancient times). In modern art, this is most often more or less detached, refined formal games with a rounded shape of the pregnant abdomen. As for the topic of motherhood, it is almost limited in the past to the religious subjects “Annunciation” and “Madonna and Child”, in the present - to a sentimental children’s or group family portrait.
One way or another, the actual subject of this process of reproduction of the human race, the executor of reproductive work - a woman - is absent, does not have her own voice of utterance. [The apotheosis of this frustration of mothers was the tradition at the dawn of photography of photographing children in the studio against the background of a mother draped in a black veil, performing the purely technical option of keeping her children upright while shooting].
If the reproductive plot also falls into the frame, then in the quality of staffing, additions, captured by the optics of a detached observer, or in the form of an image that transmits some tradition external to the woman. The story is not conducted in the first person, by a woman as a direct subject of the process. We don’t know what exactly they feel, what they think, what women are afraid during pregnancy, childbirth, what are their very first or most vivid impressions, associations associated with motherhood, with the realization of their biological reproductive function. We do not know how they reconcile within themselves the negative socio-political context - wars, violence, economic inequality - with the need to reproduce the human race and cultivate a humane principle in the child.
Women themselves on the topic of “reproductive labor” are stubbornly silent - either because of the mechanism of mental self-regulation that forces us to squeeze out, forget everything that is painful, or because of an unwritten agreement to transmit only baby-boom glamor to the outside. Actually, this glamor is very conventional and monotonous. What really pleases is happiness for mothers, young, single, waking up ten times at night, suffering from mastitis, lack of alimony and time for rest - looking at this series of chubby smiling babies, the viewer can not understand.
Feminist optics focuses on social criticism of the patriarchal system, where women are discriminated against and suppressed, that is, on criticism of the system, and not on the complex world of women’s feelings that distinguish their perception from the male. Essentialist discourse, focusing on the essence of the feminine, is today criticized by most feminists. Both in the case of a negative statement, and in the case of a positive one, reality hides behind a certain tradition.
The objective of the BIOWOMAN_REPRODUCTION exhibition is to enable women artists to speak about pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood in the first person, bypassing cliches as much as possible and not avoiding “forbidden”, painful, naive or too “natural” topics. The curator Mila Arbuzova did not set the goal for the participants to profess one or another view of motherhood in their work. The video of Yulia Gorban “9” is composed of enchanting, almost “acidic” drawings that captured the author’s physical and mental state at different stages of pregnancy - the experience of comprehending other states of consciousness, metaphysical bliss and discovering new creative possibilities. On the contrary, Maria Godovannaya in her video “Hunger”, with impartiality on the verge of spectator tolerance, documents the “daily experience of work and struggle,” which certainly accompanies the process of incorporating a child into her own adult life. Alexandra Ovchinnikova’s “saddled chair” conveys frenzy overtaking women after spending many hours on the playground.
Most of the project participants are mothers, among them there are many children. But there are also childless. Natalya Pivko printed on her headscarf the story of her childhood perinatal phobia, which grew into a child-free philosophy: “With my work I wanted to express my fear of the medical aspect of childbirth, the fear of possible complications, and the death of one of the participants in the process. The sight of the instruments, the blood, the sight of the newborns, their absolute helplessness and weakness scare me, but the women who survived the birth say that a newborn baby is beautiful. In this work I tried to imagine how the terrible that I know about childbirth is combined with the hypothetical beautiful that I heard about - I put this terrible in a beautiful shell. "
The exhibition is aimed at the psychotherapeutic and peacemaking effect, at improving mutual understanding between the sexes, removing gender tension, in the artistic sense - at overcoming the frustration and detachment of contemporary art from the true reality of human feelings, thoughts and body.
06/01/20/07/15 - Creative cluster "ARTMUZA", V.O., 13 line, d.72, 4th floor.