Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Mother Position

The Mother Position

Hackert, Nicole
Brunnet, Bruno
Graw, Isabelle

Paperback

General Art

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 386442450X
ISBN13: 9783864424502
Publisher: Snoeck Publishing Company
Published: Sep 10 2025
Pages: 40
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.50 Width: 10.90 Depth: 5.00
Language: English
The relationship between mother and child, or between caretaker and infant, has traditionally been represented as a symbiotic fusion within visual art; see the images of virgin and child by Raphael, for example. Inspired by the English psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, this exhibition takes a different view of those early childhood object relations that continue to shape how we relate to others throughout our lives. In addition to love and affection, Klein argues, the bond between the baby and its mother is also marked by aggressions, ambivalences, and strong anxious phantasies. The Mother Position brings together artworks that negotiate the complex nature of this paradigmatic object relation, whose long-term consequences resonate throughout. It is precisely because no artistic practice can do without an object relation that the equally libidinal and destructive object phantasies are worth examining. From this perspective, the fact that social interactions are currently often defined by negative feelings, splits, and one-sided repudiations is not only due to social media and the much-invoked polarization of contemporary society. Instead, The Mother Position demonstrates that our relations to the external world are also the expression of an inner psychic life that gets projected to the outside (while outside events get introjected). The exhibition thus focuses less on motherhood in the narrow sense than on a psychic position and its object relations that has its starting point in early childhood. It is a position that we keep inhabiting throughout our lives according to Klein. More so: it is a position - and this is The Mother Position' s central argument - that shapes the relationship between artists and their objects in particular.

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