Yaniya Mikhalina

Returning Senses: Passing Motherhood

Once upon a time, there was a primordial mother. She completely controlled her daughters and did not allow them to enter romantic relationships of any kind. One day, the daughters united. They killed their mother, cut her corpse into pieces, and each ate one, incorporating the law of the mother into their bodies. Since then, every human carries a part of that constitutive guilt for the act they committed in search of other forms of love — that desperate gesture of separation from the one with whom we were once undifferentiated. 

This is a brief feminized retelling of a fable that, according to Freud, attempts to trace the origins of modern civilization. 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, traced the law that traverses cultures — that is, the maternal law; the origin of concurrent love and hatred that later find a way to exist separately. Jacques Lacan, another male European thinker from the previous century, would later coin this contradictory feeling through neologism hainamoration, or love (whom I hate).

The Hannah Ryggen Triennial is a recurring framework intended to situate the work of Hannah Ryggen, one of the most politically and materially perceptive textile artists of her time, within contemporary discourse. Just like motherhood is not merely a topic but a condition that is inevitably woven into all facets of life, so too is weaving a perspective through which to view the world. Weaving, like motherhood, is slow: a world-making in itself. Ryggen’s piece Grini (1945), rarely shown because of its physical fragility, was an important starting point for the conceptualization of the curatorial process at Trondheim Kunstmuseum. It visualized for us the building of connections between forms of passing histories and affects contoured by our cultural repertoires, by the threads and hands we have at our disposal. Rather than conceiving a ready-made concept for the show, Marianne Zamecznik and I, co-curators, allowed the exhibition to develop organically, one step at a time, through encounters, discoveries, possibilities, urgencies, and economic realities.

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 singular and incomparable. Any attempt to essentialize it would inevitably lead to exclusion, so our continuous conversation with Zamecznik about possible directions for the exhibition — with other mothers, daughters, landscapes, motherlands, mother tongues, inner mothers, mothernisms — is processed through the fundamental impossibility of full representation. Yet we 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 extractivist geopolitical landscape, are refused the right to choose whether or not to become one (which is also a spectrum of experience). The distribution, representation, and articulation of motherhood are not equal, and these unequal representations 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. The process of being formed results in our senses: our ability to hear, touch, see, smell, and taste. As one grows up, these fragmented senses slowly coalesce over time and reveal 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 once 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. With the hope of acknowledging motherhood as a form of history told from our particular present, in which thousands of Palestinian mothers have been deprived of life, the labor of exhibition-making feels vain. Yet, this labor is part of an unending struggle: for dignity, recognition, and solidarity. It is an attempt to support the inherently complicated process of diluting the effects of love and hate, first projected and condensed on the mother figure, further into 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 it — goes hand in hand with motherhood as a form of care for this struggle and for the world itself. Not least, this is a struggle on the playing field of aesthetics, and museums are often seen as places to enjoy rather than rethink and engage with it.

Whether climbing the stairs or using the museum’s relic of an elevator, we invite you to celebrate, mourn, respect, critique, and stand alongside us, despite the conscious and unconscious differences we start from when entering the terrains of motherhood. For example: Despite the immense exhaustion of our current global condition, we invite you to acknowledge the right and responsibility of each of us to contribute to the always partial understanding of forms of life that continually emerge from the darkness of the womb into the cradle of reality. Like maternal labor, this is an effort that cannot be paused — but passed.