From the politics of reproductive justice, to care labor, to nonnormative family constellations, contemporary artists have dramatically reshaped representations of motherhood. Such interventions move beyond the maternal as a matter of biography and iconography, historically tied to the reproductive female body. Encompassing instead a multiplicity of views, from queer and Black motherhood to cis-men claiming this lived terrain, the maternal would now seem to operate as a site of critical agency, with the potential to render strange our first and foundational encounter with otherness.
A multi-year research initiative based at Leuphana University, The M/Other Project seeks to describe and assess this transformation:
Does the so-called maternal turn in contemporary art equate to a transversal of values, supplanting patriarchal and Eurocentric concepts of art?
Or is artistic maternalism simply feminism for hard times, a retreat during a backlash of neo-conservativism and neo-nationalism?
What can such artworks, moreover, tell us about the analytical uses of the maternal, particularly art history’s opposition between biological reproduction and artistic creativity?
In moving from a paradigm of creation against procreation to creation as procreation, might those moments of sustaining life also be our most creative?
Generously funded by the VolkswagenStiftung’s Freigeist initiative, The M/Other Project is a multi-year research project based at Leuphana University. It is docked at the Institute of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, in collaboration with the Institute of Art, Music, and Education.
The M/Other Project investigates maternal aesthetic practice across a range of disciplines, including education, literature, critical theory, and feminist philosophy. In addition to close-readings of artworks and archival research, the project also employs a comparative analysis, examining artworks produced in Europe, the U.S. and Latin America—cultural contexts in which the contradictions of the maternal have been especially acute.