By Yaniya Mikhalina, artist-researcher and co-curator of Passing Motherhood.

 

Once upon a time, there was a primordial mother. She undividedly controlled her daughters and didn't allow them to enter love relationships of any kind. One day, the daughters united to kill their mother, cut her corpse into pieces, and each ate one, incorporating the law of the mother inside. Since then, every human being on Earth carries a part of that constitutive guilt committed in search of other forms of love, in the desperate gesture of separation from the one we once were undifferentiated with. 

 

This is a brief remake of a fable that attempts to trace the origins of modern civilization according to Freud, rewritten from a feminized perspective. Freud’s original version first appeared in the collection of essays Totem and Taboo (1913), where the author, in accordance with the colonial frameworks of his time,  was tracing the law that traverses cultures – that is, the maternal law; the beginnings of confluenced, concurrent love and hatred that later find their ways to part into the world. 

Jacques Lacan, another male European thinker from the previous century, would later coin this contradictory feeling through neologism hainamoration, or love (whom I hate).

 

Motherhood is hardcore, or hard at its core, no matter what form of motherhood one finds themselves in: the state of motherhood cannot be generalized; it's not just diverse, but different and incomparable. Any attempt to essentialize it would inevitably lead to exclusion, so our continuous conversation about possible directions for the exhibition  – with other mothers, daughters, landscapes, motherlands, mother tongues, inner mothers, mothernisms –is always processed through the fundamental impossibility of full representation. Yet there is believe that mothers should not be alone: being a mother also means standing in solidarity with other mothers, and with those who, in the current geopolitical extractivist landscape, are refused the right to be a mother – or not to be one, where the latter is also a spectrum. The distribution, representation, and articulation of motherhood are not equal and reproduce the juridical-political hierarchy of the world.

 

It takes around nine months to grow a child. There is a quotidian alchemy, an often-omitted dignity in being formed from the void, in the warm and tight space of the womb whose hospitality leaves no conscious memory. Its result is our senses: our opportunity to hear,  to touch, to see, to smell, to taste. Growing up, the senses from the partial state get assembled into a face, a body, a world. Every human being orchestrates her own peculiar relationships between the senses we all have but don´t share. In moments of crisis, this fragile constellation can collapse in order to become a safe myopic universe of partial objects again.

 

Mothers have teeth, voices, hands, and sometimes wombs. In Norwegian, the outer part of the womb is called mormunn , the mouth of the mother. It's a linguistic testimony that the body of the mother is reassembled by the labor she goes through, bringing new meanings to the ways of passing histories from mouth to mouth . In hope of acknowledging motherhood as a form of history as told from our particular present, when thousands of Palestinian mothers have been deprived of life, the exhibition labor of feels idle. Yet, this labor is part of a struggle that will never end: a struggle for dignity, recognition, solidarity, and attempts to support the per se  complicated process of diluting the affects of love and hate, first projected and condensed on the mother figure, further to the world.  On this journey,  the topic of motherhood as a form of care, often employed by discourses who wish to privatize and de-politicize motherhood , goes hand in hand with motherhood as a form of care for the struggle, care for the world. Not least, this  is a struggle on the field of aesthetics, and museums often seen as a place to enjoy it, rather than to rethink and engage together with it.

 

The Hannah Ryggen Triennial is a recurrent framework to situate the work of one of the most time- and medium-sensitive artists of her time, Hannah Ryggen, within the present moment. Just like motherhood is not simply a topic but a condition that is inevitably woven into all facets of life, being a weaver is also a perspective toward the world, informed by slow, meticulous work, a world-making in itself. Ryggen's piece Grini (1945), rarely shown because of its physical fragility, became such a condition for conceptualization of the exhibition-making process at Trondheim Kunstmuseum, building connectivities between forms of passing histories and affects contoured by our cultural repertoires, by the threads and hands we have at our disposal. Instead of coming up with a ready-made concept of the show, me and Marianne Zamecnik, as co-curators, allowed ourselves to take one step at a time and let the exhibition develop organically, through encounters, findings, possibilities, urgencies and economic reality. 

 

Whether climbing the stairs or using museum´s relic elevator, we invite you to celebrate, mourn, respect, critique, and stand nearby, despite the conscious and unconscious differences we start from when entering the terrains of motherhood. We invite you to acknowledge the right and responsibility to contribute our partial understandings of everything that comes after the void to the cradle of reality, despite the immense tiredness,  Alike maternal labor, this is an effort that cannot be paused – but passed.