Tracey Emin in Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood
22 June—29 September 2024
Group exhibition at Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, UK
Hayward Gallery Touring’s major group exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood will plunge into the joys and heartaches, mess, myths and mishaps of motherhood through over 100 artworks, from the feminist avant-garde to the present day.
While the Madonna and Child is one of the great subjects of European art, we rarely see art about motherhood as a lived experience, in all its complexity. Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood will address this blind spot in art history, asserting the artist mother as an important – if rarely visible – cultural figure. Featuring the work of more than sixty modern and contemporary artists, this exhibition will approach motherhood as a creative enterprise, albeit one at times tempered by ambivalence, exhaustion or grief. Acts of Creation will explore lived experience of motherhood, offering a complex account that engages with contemporary concerns about gender, caregiving and reproductive rights.
The exhibition will address diverse experiences of motherhood across three themes: Creation, which looks at conception, pregnancy, birth and nursing; Maintenance which explores motherhood and caregiving in the day-to-day; and Loss, which touches on miscarriage and involuntary childlessness, as well as reproductive rights. The heart of the exhibition is a series of revelatory self-portraits – a celebration of the artist as mother.
Featuring painting, photography, sculpture, sound and film, artists in the exhibition include: Felicity Allen, Janine Antoni, Cassie Arnold, Bobby Baker, Elina Brotherus, Liesel Burisch, Cathy Cade, Lea Cetera, Jai Chuhan, Eileen Cooper, Renee Cox, Dorothy Cross, Rineke Dijkstra, Natalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, Leni Dothan, Marlene Dumas (in collaboration with her daughter Helena), Catherine Elwes, Tracey Emin, Jessa Fairbrother, Rachel Fallon, Feministo, VALIE EXPORT, Fenix, Maeve Gilmore, Anna Grevenitis, Ghislaine Howard, The Hackney Flashers, Camille Henrot, Susan Hiller, Elsa James, Chantal Joffe, Claudette Johnson, Mary Kelly, Material Fantasies, Liss LaFleur, Sally Mann, Mother Art, Lindsey Mendick, Wangechi Mutu, Ishbel Myerscough, Catherine Opie, Fani Parali, Celia Paul, Cathie Pilkington, Laure Prouvost, Paula Rego, Su Richardson, Sister Seven, Monica Sjöö, Annegret Soltau, Tabitha Soren, Heather Spears, Nancy Spero, Hannah Starkey, Emma Talbot, Barbara Walker, Caroline Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Nancy Willis, Hermione Wiltshire and Clare Bottomley, Daphne Wright, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Christine Voge, Del LaGrace Volcano, Carmen Winant and Billie Zangewa