ICM New Conversations Series
Holiday Powers
Assistant Professor, Modern and Contemporary Art, VCUarts, Qatar
Abstract
Despite both a significant presence of pregnant and postpartum bodies in popular culture and an increasing interest in feminist scholarly literature on pregnancy and maternity (both the experience and the representation thereof), there is a notable absence of maternal bodies in large scale global contemporary art, typified by biennials, major museums and foundations, and significant commissions. I argue in this talk that motherhood, namely representations of pregnant and post-partum bodies or bodies involved in the care of infants, is taboo in contemporary art for multiple reasons. Firstly, this is because of the fundamental isolation within the patriarchal institution of motherhood itself that moreover centers the experience of white, middle-class, heterosexual, and cisgender mothers. Within the art world, this is exacerbated because of the structural focus on mobility in global contemporary art, and because pregnancy links sex and gender while there is changing focus in the art world to nonbinary expressions of gender. Given this multilayered discomfort with maternal bodies, art practices that include maternal bodies and the subjectivity of maternity are either silenced by curatorial reframing that focuses on other aspects of the work, or exhibited and understood as specific provocations against this taboo. I argue, however, that motherhood needs to be reframed as a transnational vector of solidarity within which we can reconsider these trends in art practice.
Bio
Holiday Powers is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at VCUarts Qatar. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University, where her doctoral research focused on modernism in Morocco. She has contributed to publications including Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and The Journal of North African Studies.
