At first glance, Passing Motherhood might seem to revolve around a single, contained theme: the experience of mothering. Yet from the very beginning, the exhibition demonstrates how motherhood, in all its sensible and political dimensions, stretches far beyond the individual context — reaching into questions of land and belonging, war and displacement, memory and inheritance, as well as institutional frameworks surrounding it. The artworks, archival materials, testimonies and historical objects assembled for the exhibition underscore the vast matrices in which “motherhood” is continuously created, contested, and transferred, across bodies, geographies, and generations. In this polyphonic landscape, we recognize the threads — routes — through which the exhibition can be experienced, and drawn on the exhibition map to be found in the ensuing pages. The act of mapping is an invitation to create a route of one’s own as it is the viewer’s experience that gives birth to the new relationships between the works.
This catalogue is not just a record of each piece but an invitation to look closer — to examine the relationships that tether us together, at the histories that form us, and at the fragile spaces of transformation that we inherit. Through engaging with Passing Motherhood’s artworks and contexts, we honor the collective labor that all forms of “passing on” entail: the hands that stitch, the words that survive, the breath that makes up a rhythm. At the same time, we pay attention to the “passing”: the missed, the overlooked, the left behind. May these pages, and the exhibition, offer new ways to see, to remember, and to imagine how we hold and are held by others.
Acknowledging the ongoing wars in our turbulent times, one of the threads in the exhibition is the relation between war and motherhood, explored, for instance, in Sheba Chhachhi and Sonia Jabbar’s “When the Gun is Raised, Dialogue Stops…”: Women’s Voices From the Kashmir Valley (2000). In this installation, Kashmiri women, of diverse religious and ethnic background, come together to speak of the violence that has torn apart their land, homes, families, and sense of belonging. Hannah Ryggen’s tapestry Grini (1945) captures motherhood under siege, depicting the artist’s daughter Mona bringing a piece of their home island of Fosen to her father, who, during the Second World War, was imprisoned in the notorious Falstad concentration camp (81 km from Trondheim) and, later, in Grini, outside Oslo. Echoing these narratives, a display of wooden birds and other toys from the collection of the Guttormsgaard archive, painstakingly carved by Soviet prisoners of war in Norway, also during the Second World War, is presented in the same room. These “beautiful objects of resistance”, contextualized by art historian Ellef Prestsæter’s contribution to this catalogue and activated through a series of handling sessions, speak to longing for family and home in the midst of captivity. This longing nourished prisoners of war in a literal sense: the toys were used as a currency in exchange for food. Another work from the Guttormsgaard archive is Käthe Kollwitz’s print Tod, Frau und Kind (Death, Woman and Child) (1910) which offers an equally piercing view of maternal grief on a corporeal level. In each instance, an environment shaped by violence and loss refracts and redefines the roles and notions of mothers, children and families.
Another thread of the exhibition explores motherhood and displacement and the importance and complexity of one’s roots in this relationship. The poet Athena Farrokhzad’s Brev till en krigerska (Letter to a Warrior) (2016) is a monologue written for Swedish Radio. It interweaves lullabies of contested homelands with anticipation of birth, both as a militant act of resistance and one’s rebirth in a new land. Aline Motta’s filmic meditation, A água é uma máquina do tempo (Water is a Time Machine) (2023), shows us how mother-daughter bonds are entangled across centuries of racial oppression, colonisation and obliviated dreams, reflected through the liminal power of water. Marin Shamov’s Mothe*rhood Instruction (2021–2025) brings displacement into cyberspace, presenting an interactive “sound performance-game” that tasks participants with meeting a “cyber” child’s needs during times of crisis, thereby mirroring the complexities faced by actual m*others navigating displacement, at times forced to return to a hostile land, all seen from a queer perspective.
Motherhood also takes shape on and through the body, as seen in Thora Dolven Balke’s Gravitas (2024), in which silicone casts of infant bathtubs appear as uncanny, skin-like shells, evoking both tender care and the intense physical reality of parenting. Louise Bourgeois’s small yet monumental sculpture Femme (2005) and Elise Storsveen’s expansive tapestry Fødselen (The Birth) (2023) both treat pregnancy as a site of immense strength and vulnerable transformation. By contrast, the ancient Japanese dogū figurines (11,000–400 BC) illustrate how body-centric ritual forms have anchored cultural narratives of fertility and regeneration for millennia. Once mislabeled as haniwa[1], these spiritual objects open up a potential for institutional self-critique[2] by western museums.
Notions of home and belonging, and the politics around them, thread through Basma al-Sharif’s Morgen Kreis (Morning Circle) (2025), a film and research project, in which the seemingly innocent rituals of a kindergarten circle emerge as a key stage for shaping subjecthood, imperceptibly bound up with nation-state ideologies. As part of the work, a workshop will be organized for Trondheim-based persons who are from migrant backgrounds or/and parents of children in the public school system, as well as for anyone who might find the theme interesting.
Belonging is problematized with the presence of a Sámi doll purchased by a Norwegian family and later absorbed into a museum setting, and a photograph of a buvrie (a Sámi food storage house), both from the collection of Sverresborg Trøndelag Folkemuseum. Al-Sharif’s project and displaying of museum objects illuminate how children’s spaces reflect — and shape — cultural memory. In the exhibition, play, seen from a child’s point of view, is introduced with Nils Aas’s Elefant (1968), a play sculpture made of concrete, originally donated by the artist and installed in an Oslo suburb, that will be presented in the exhibition space as a scaled down model. Inspired by the play sculpture sub-genre, a temporary playground will be organized in the middle of the exhibition space as a curatorial intervention.
A different, but equally generative, perspective on homes that one inherits is the exhibition-within-an-exhibition curated by Maritea Dæhlin, focusing on her mother, Gitte Dæhlin, and her grandmother, Lisbet Dæhlin — three generations of artists who negotiated, and continue to negotiate, craft traditions, familial dynamics and social commitments. Their respective materials weave the domestic sphere into a broader socio-political tapestry: Gitte’s life in Mexico, shaped by indigenous culture and Zapatista solidarity, and Lisbet’s belief in the power of everyday objects to foster shared human experiences such as mealtimes. Maritea’s presentation foregrounds the child’s perspective — an outlook we all share — looking back toward prior mothers who have shaped our worlds. Meanwhile, Aline Motta’s reflections further expand the adult child’s perspective in relation to maternal ancestors, highlighting how genealogies are informed by migration, inheritance and creative re-invention.
Another bridge that can be built across many of the works is the idea of soil and land. Sheba Chhachhi and Sonia Jabbar incorporate local earth, from Trondheim, into their installation, while Veslemøy Lilleengen’s temporary workshop station Grunntanker (Grounded Thoughts) (2021) invites visitors to contribute soil from places dear to them, shaping it into polished spheres in a dorodango[3] technique, thereby embodying personal and collective memories. Lilleengen’s process is linked to her family’s farm on Fosen, adjacent to the land where Hannah Ryggen once lived. Ryggen famously dyed her own wool with plants from her garden, engaging the earth directly in her artistic practice. Ryggen’s famous “pot” blue was made using urine as a key ingredient. The blue and the soil also figure in the ceramics of Lisbet Dæhlin, who prized a specific fine-grained blue clay that produced a distinctive hue upon firing.
As the following pages show, each form of participation — whether a living artist, an archival entry, or a historical presence — offers a distinct perspective on care, birth, inheritance and the sociopolitical contexts that shape how we carry one another across time. The exhibition and catalogue function as a kaleidoscope of viewpoints: from personal memory and embodied practice to colonial histories and institutional critique, and from the technological mediation of care to centuries-old ritual objects that have crossed borders and epochs. These works remind us that “motherhood” is an ever-shifting, multivalent state. The contributions demonstrate, and perform, how mothering is transmitted through bodies, cultural structures, words, silence, trauma, images, crafts and gestures of resilience. This transmission is manifested in many ways: a tapestry woven in defiance of war, a glimmering sphere of compressed earth, a digitally programmed “cyber child”, or the sound of someone else’s mother tongue.
The process of creating this exhibition has itself been fluid and open-ended, shaped by coincidences, dreams, dialogues with artists and researchers, as well as evolving political realities. We embrace this incompleteness, seeing in it a similar generosity at the heart of mothering, a continuously unfolding endeavor that can never be fully contained.
- Marianne Zamecznik
[1] In the text about the objects on loan from Nordenfjeldske Museum of Decorative Arts, one can read Yaniya Mikhalina’s reflections on the mislabeling of the figurines.
[2] The term “institutional self-critique” is borrowed from art historian and curator Pernille Lystlund Matzen's dissertation Whose Bildung? Institutional self-critique in art exhibitions on colonial history (Aarhus University, 2024).
[3] One can read more about the ancient dorodango technique in the text relating to Veslemøy Lilleengen’s project Grunntanker (2021).