The Mother Position

The relationship between mother and child, or between caretaker and infant, has traditionally been depicted in the visual arts as a symbiotic fusion. See, for instance, Raphael’s images of the Madonna. This exhibition, however – inspired by the English psychoanalyst Melanie Klein – takes a different view of those early childhood “object relations” that shape our relationship to other people throughout our lives. Besides love and affection, the infant’s attachment to its mother or its caretaker is, according to Klein, also characterised by aggression, ambivalence and anxiety fantasies. “The Mother Position” brings together artistic works in which the complex abysses of this object relation become apparent and are negotiated. The long-term consequences of this paradigmatic relationship also resonate. Precisely because no artistic practice can manage without a relation to objects, it is worth engaging with these object fantasies, which are as libidinal as they are destructive. That bad feelings, splittings and one-sided repudiations largely determine the social interactions of our society today is accordingly not merely a matter of the much-invoked “polarisation” or of social media. Rather, “The Mother Position” demonstrates that our relationships to others are also the expression of an inner psychic life that is projected outwards (while external events are introjected). The exhibition is concerned less with motherhood in the narrower sense than with a psychic position and its object relations, which take their point of departure in early childhood. According to Klein, we assume this position again and again over the course of our lives. What is more – and this is the central argument of “The Mother Position” – it is a position that also shapes the artists’ relationship to their objects and occasionally even becomes apparent in them. (Isabelle Graw in her text “The Power of Object Relations“)

Exhibition:
Contemporary Fine Arts CFA Basel, 31/8 – 26/10/2024