Loans and exhibitions
Genders: Shaping and Breaking the Binary
We loaned Once You Care You're Future by Laura Yuile
GENDERS presented a playful and kaleidoscopic view of genders and its relationship with science, as well as factors like class, culture, race, age and sexuality. The season aimed to open conversation through personal perspectives on and beyond the female and male ‘binaries’. Drawing on the latest research from King’s College London, the season examined ideas of gender today. The exhibition featured artworks, scientific research and collaborative projects, and invited audiences to interact with and speculate upon the factors that shape our behaviour and our understanding of genders.
Science Gallery London aimed to offer a safe space to discuss, debate and connect with others on this most personal of subjects.
A series of free events accompanied the GENDERS exhibition including Friday Lates, performances, workshops and more.
https://london.sciencegallery.com/genders
Matrescence and Maternality
For this exhibition we loaned the works: Therese in Ecstatic Childbirth by Hermione Wiltshire and The Crowning by Judy Chicago.
The first in a two-part exhibition on maternal politics, identity and embodiment, ‘Matrescence’ brought together an international range of works from immediately contemporary artists with an older generation of artists to address the unresolved issues around maternal subjectivity, embodiment and politics; issues that remain as pertinent today as when they were first explored in the 1970s. The group show explored the idea of ‘Matrescence,’ a term developed by anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973 in an attempt to theorise the transformational processes of becoming a mother – one that is never really fully resolved.
Curated by Catherine McCormack, the core themes for this exhibition included ‘public and private reproductive bodies’, ‘maternity and obscenity’, as well as a rethinking of the eponymous archetype of the silent, suffering and idealised mother represented in Christian iconography.
‘Maternality’ is the second instalment of the two-part show on maternal politics and embodiment which focused on reproduction and the materiality of maternal bodies.
Curated by Catherine McCormack, the exhibition finds its starting point in the etymological root of the word “mother” as synonymous of matter (mater/materia in Latin) in a group show exploring female reproductive bodies in terms of material relations, both physical and political
More information at:
https://www.richardsaltoun.com/exhibitions/79-matrescence-pv-thursday-14-november-6-8pm/overview/
https://www.richardsaltoun.com/exhibitions/79-part-1-matrescence/press_release_text/
Birth
For this exhibition Birth Rites Collection loaned Terese in Ecstatic Birth by Hermione Wiltshire
“We all experience birth – and yet, unlike sex and death (art’s favourite subjects) encounters with birth in contemporary art are rare. Birth is the universal subject – so why is it so obviously absent in contemporary art? To put it down to the oppression of women’s bodies would be a fundamental reason; but it’s more complicated than that. Explicit and direct images of childbirth elicit profound emotional responses. Birth is universal, but it is also intensely private and individual.
Artists are as likely to self-censor their work on the subject as galleries and museums are to shy away from presenting it in the public space. While safe expressions of birth include pregnancy, breastfeeding and ultrasound scans, depictions of the gruelling, transformative, violent, sexual, psychological and physical consequences of birthing a body from a body are controversial.
Birth is not, as visual culture would have us believe, always a happy experience. Whether women choose to give birth or not, our bodies are politically policed and defined by fertility; a whole industry has grown around it, from egg-freezing to surrogacy and IVF.
From a prepubescent age we are taught to fear pregnancy, but later in life we learn it isn’t something we can control. From first menstruation until menopause, women aren’t ever truly free from the question of birth. Conventional ideas about birth are only part of the picture: miscarriage, abortion, and infertility remain taboo topics despite the huge number of people whose lives they affect.
It’s these acute, candid, unflinching depictions of all aspects of birth that we wanted to bring together in Birth – an exhibition of twenty-four artists who are changing our perception of the most underexplored and underrated subject in art.” - Text by curator Charlotte Jansen.
More information at: https://www.tjboulting.com/birth-curated-by-charlotte-jansen