Text From ‘Mother Cuts’ Exhibition Leaflet, curated and written by Siona Wilson, 2008.
Mother Cuts: Experiments in Film and Video
The Visual Arts Gallery, New Jersey City University, March 5-April 11, 2009
The exhibition brings together four works spanning a thirty-year period that take the idea of the maternal relation as their shared theme. The artists presented – Mieke Bal, Mary Kelly, Mona Hatoum, and Sarah Pucill – each touch on a peculiarly ambivalent aspect of this relation in their emphasis on the question of separation and connection. While the contradictory qualities of intimacy and distance or bind and cut are animated by very different kinds of social, geographic, political, and economic issues, the idea gains traction in all the artists’ work from the memory or imagination of the embodied experiences of pregnancy and birth. Mona Hatoum and Mieke Bal ask us to consider questions of economic and political migration and the emotional pangs of longing that result for both mother and daughter. Sarah Pucill and Mary Kelly, on the other hand, touch lightly upon the pleasures of maternal embodiment as a model for a different kind of imagined spectatorship. All of the artists use the moving image and the effects of the different kinds of media – super 8, video, 16mm film, and videoed photography – are foregrounded in all the works. The skin-like quality of tactility offered by the camera’s vision and the light from the projector lens seems to suggest a metaphor for the strangeness of intergenerational relationships with mothers. Moreover, each artist presents carefully staged experiments in the physical and ethical relationship between camera and subject. This only further emphasizes the complexity of this unique relationship with its ambivalent combination of intimacy and distance.
The American artist Mary Kelly first showed Antepartum in 1974 in an informal installation at Portsmouth Polytechnic in England, but its first fully public screening was not until 1999. This film loop installation originally used the informal ‘domestic’ format of super 8 (frequently used for home movies), but it has subsequently been transferred to a digital format. Kelly presents a static camera close-in t oher own heavily pregnant body that she caresses periodically using a series of orchestrated gestures. In its original super-8 format, the projector with attached film loop apparatus is presented alongside the spectator. When the apparatus of reproduction is also on view, the reproductive analogy – camera to pregnant body – is further extended. The conveyor belt of reproductive film is a visual reminder of the technological umbilical cord of light that connects the spectator to the screen. With its unusual point of view and the emphasis placed on the carefully framed self-caress, Kelly’s film is among the first feminist works to re-imagine the maternal body in a decisively anti-sentimental way.
Measures of Distance, made by the London-based Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, describes a period when the artist was separated from her family because of the Lebanese war. The soundtrack is drawn from the mother and daughter’s letters to each other. These letters, written in Arabic, have been translated into English and are read out by the artist. The voice of Hatoum as narrator is set off against a background of female voices speaking in her mother tongue in what sounds like a domestic setting. This lively female conversation remains untranslated and is thus inaccessible to non-Arabic speakers, which emphasizes the distance between us as ‘foreign’ spectators and as outsiders to this intimate mother/daughter relationship. This device also reiterates the separation that the mother and daughter have experienced because of war and exile. Together with references to wartime interruptions to normal everyday activities and familial longing, these letters also recount the last time the artist visited her home in exile in Lebanon when she made a sequence of photographs of her mother in the shower. Hatoum stages an intimate bodily maternal reconnection through the medium of photography with fragments of these images appearing as enlarged and ghostly details on the monitor screen.
Nothing is Missing is a multiple screen video installation by the Dutch video artist Mieke Bal. The audience sits on familiar domestic sofas and armchairs to watch intimate video portraits that present the everyday emotional effects of economic migration into Europe. An older woman, a mother, is the only figure on-screen and she responds to an off-screen voice. The artist has set up the filmed scene but she withdraws for the duration of the interview and a close relative-son, daughter-in-law, or sister – conducts an unscripted and casual interview. In contrast to the often sensational and xenophobic political rhetoric frequently used by the European (and American) media, Bal uses the televisual format to develop what she terms a ‘migratory aesthetic’. Nothing is Missing is an anti-spectacular and intimate ‘monument’ to the mothers who remain at home as their children migrate to European metropolitan centres. The installation presented here is one part of a larger ongoing project that so far includes fifteen filmed accounts of stories by mothers from all the inhabited continents in the world.
In Taking My Skin the English filmmaker Sarah Pucill shows herself and her mother ‘playing’ with a range of different moving image cameras. Using a macro lens to film in extreme close up, mother and daughter take turns watching each other and discussing the physical, psychological, and perceptual effects of being viewer and viewed. Although the dialogue is unscripted the artist’s questions to her mother are certainly not random. The measured but casual tone she adopts, along with the ‘non-professional’ visual footage, produces the effect of an unstructured and freewheeling child-like enquiry, with moments of delighted discovery. In a beautiful scene that stages the mother/daughter separation across the space of a room, Pucill’s mother is prompted to recount her own memories of the artist as a dependent baby. Her remembered pleasures of a now long gone bodily intimacy are juxtaposed with a newly discovered technological intimacy.
In conclusion, for visitors to the exhibition, the topic of maternity is invariably also determined by personal experience. To put it plainly, we all have mothers. In American culture the figure of the Mother is either idealised or vilified, we blame them for our flaws and insecurities – and sometimes for society’s failings too. But more frequently we belittle the maternal relationship by the patronising gesture of sentimentality. The works gathered together in this exhibition try to avoid all these well-worn responses. Taken together they give us a vivid sense of the lived, felt and imagined peculiarities and complexities of maternal connection and separation within an international frame.
Siona Wilson is Assistant Professor of art history at the College of Staten Island. The City University of New York.