The Mother Position

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.