Férocité à domicile

Férocité à domicile explores the ambivalence of the maternal bond through the work of seven artists - Chantal Akerman, Tolia Astakhishvili (with Zurab Astakhishvili, Simon Lässig and Maka Sanadze), Cudelice Brazelton IV, Rosa Joly, Harilay Rabenjamina, Rosemarie Trockel and Sebastian Wiegand. With sensitive and contrasting approaches, these artists intimately grasp the way in which this complex relationship shapes our presence in the world.

Chantal Akerman's film News from Home (1977) is the starting point for the exhibition, highlighting the complexity of maternal love with striking acuity. At once a refuge and an insidious trap, this love, expressed by the video-maker's mother in the letters she wrote to her daughter, who was living in New York at the time, oscillates between tenderness, guilt and infantilisation. This contradiction - which I call ferocity - is at the heart of the exhibition. It unfolds in works in which the mother figure haunts the space with a presence that is as diffuse as it is oppressive, whether it's an upright but self-effacing mother in Rosemarie Trockel's mural fresco, a domestic space under construction by Tolia Astakhishvili or Rosa Joly's dark, ghostly dolls' houses. The home, traditionally seen as a protective cocoon, here becomes a theatre of trouble, a territory of uncertainty where intimate space is precarious and fragile. The sculptures and wall-tattoos by Cudelice Brazelton IV, and the video installation by Harilay Rabenjamina, highlight a maternal figure relaying social and aesthetic norms shaped by the assimilation of racial violence and classism. Sebastian Wiegand's paintings, meanwhile, extend this reflection to the Western political heritage of the 1960s and 1970s. The choice of yellow-orange colours combined with the hippy-style representations conjure up the utopia of an era marked by sexual freedom, feminist impulses and revolutionary hopes. Lying on her sofa, the mother appears at the end of her tether.

Between presence and absence, tenderness and dispossession, singularity and the transmission of social constructs, these works sketch out a nuanced cartography of the maternal bond. Love, far from being an absolute bulwark, spares neither the unconscious contradictions inherent in parenthood nor dysfunctional relationships. While society (in a traditional nuclear family) assigns the mother the role of guardian of the home, the father in return often occupies a marginal position. The question of love cannot therefore be dissociated from that of the place assigned to the mother in a patriarchal society: what behaviour does this assignment engender? What are the repercussions?

Oriane Durand                                                                                                              Curator

Image: Tolia Astakhishvili, With and Without Light, 2023, view of the exhibition ‘Living Spaces’, Galerie Molitor, Berlin, 2023. Photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza. Courtesy of the artist.