HOME TRUTHS – PHOTOGRAPHY, MOTHERHOOD, IDENTITY
2013-12-18The work in Home Truths: Photography, Motherhood and Identity aims to challenge long held stereotypes and sentimental views of motherhood. Set against a backdrop of the seemingly insatiable appetite for pictures of celebrity mums, streams of Instagram bumps and babies and a history of the Madonna motif in art history, the work hereaddresses changing conditions of power, gender, domesticity, the maternal body and familial relations. It is a critical space for the representation of mothers to exist aside from more reductive cultural assumptions of mothering.
As a theme often overlooked in contemporary art making, the work here is highly subjective, with a sense of seriousness and intense reflection. Much of the work also reflects contemporaneous impulses in photography to photograph everything, however seemingly inappropriate. Home Truths: Photography, Motherhood and Identity questions both the identity of the mother figure, but also the identity of photography at a time when the expectations and demands of both are in flux, and both subject and medium grapple for new meaning.
The exhibiting artists are Janine Antoni, Elina Brotherus, Elinor Carucci, Ana Casas Broda, Fred Hüning, Leigh Ledare, Katie Murray and Hanna Putz.
Exhibition runs through to January 5th, 2014
The Photographers’ Gallery
16 – 18 Ramillies Street
London
W1F 7LW
thephotographersgallery.org.uk
