“No doubt I will be unwell, until I write something . . . to do with her.” This note in Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, dated 15 December 1978, a little more than a year after his mother’s death, foreshadows the writing, the following spring, of his Camera Obscura. A theoretical essay on the nature of photography as a medium, this celebrated work revolves around the quest to rediscover, in the image, the truth of that beloved face, his departed mother’s.
The mother, whose gaze is the first mirror not only of the self but of the world that surrounds us, has been a central motif in the history of art. While all very different in originating context (social, geographical, historical) and in formal and aesthetic approach, the works assembled here are united in testifying to more than personal feeling alone. Whether proposing social critique or a quest for the self, manifesting the reality of presence or the void of absence, conjuring consolation or fending off threat, all raise the question of filiation, of what remains.
Is the figure we think we know so well not in fact an endless enigma, an image that needs a deliberate, conscious effort to bring into focus, as for Dirk Braeckman or Hervé Guibert? LaToya Ruby Frazier, for her part, wonders what we inherit, if anything, of the mother’s story, spoken or unspoken. In these confrontations, the effort to conjure mother within the formal structures favoured by the artist often enough prompts humour or irreverence, as in Ragnar Kjartansson, Ilene Segalove, or Hannah and Bernhard Blume – when they are not occasions to interrogate, challenge or defy the rules of an oppressive or even annihilating social and moral order, as for Michel Journiac and Mark Raidpere. And when the mother tends to disappear– Paul Graham, Pier Paolo Pasolini – or has already departed – Lebohang Kganye, Sophie Calle, or Rebekka Deubner – what image can take her place?
The mother here is more than a person – she is a figure for access to the world, for play, for interpersonal identification, but also for loss and longing: “The spring of my emotion, the image of my mother” – Samuel Beckett
Julie Héraut , Curator of A partir d’elle
Featuring works by Roland Barthes, Anna & Bernhard Blume, Dirk Braeckman, Sophie Calle, Rebekka Deubner, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Paul Graham, Hervé Guibert, Michel Journiac, Lebohang Kganye, Ragnar Kjartansson, Anna Maria Maiolino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mark Raidpere, and Ilene Segalove.
