Robyn Alexander, who helped curate an exhibition on the reproductive body, explains the thinking behind the show
The Bringing Up Baby exhibition is part of the main programme at the Standard Bank National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. It was first conceived (and, of course, that verb is used deliberately) by its curator Terry Kurgan, during the historic public hearings on South African abortion law reform in Parliament in October 1996.
The tensions, controversy and publicity generated by the abortion debate bore witness, according to Kurgan, to the extent to which issues around the reproductive body have repercussions in broader social, economic and moral spheres. She was inspired by the realisation that the hearings were important because they resulted in the changing of the previously discriminatory abortion law and also because all this discussion was taking place in the public realm.
The process became a public display which, in Kurgan’s words, “transgressed taboos surrounding sexuality and the private domain. For once, issues that are usually thought of as strictly private were being talked about outside the kitchens, bedrooms and other domestic spaces in which women `normally’ talk to each other”.
Believing that art exhibitions and the events around them are important places of exchange of ideas between people, Kurgan began working on her idea for a show in which a variety of artists would produce new work around the general theme of the reproductive body.
Artists asked to produce work for Bringing Up Baby were encouraged to explore and challenge traditional representations of, and assumptions about, the experiences of pregnancy, birth, being infertile or choosing not to have children, mothering, fathering and being a child.
As a result, the exhibition explores territory that seems commonplace and ordinary: after all, everyone has at least some experience of the reproductive body. But these supposedly private-realm experiences are also important social issues, Kurgan says. And there are a multitude of radically different experiences within this area – gender, race, class, sexual orientation, culture, religion and many other factors – influencing the ways the reproductive body is experienced, seen and thought about.
Bringing Up Baby, says Kurgan, aims to signal the range and variety of this experience rather than provide definitive answers to the questions raised by its explorations.
The work on Bringing Up Baby was almost all commissioned specially for the project. The group of 18 exhibitors includes some who are well-known and well-established in South Africa and abroad, as artists, curators, academics, writers and critics. Some are at relatively early stages of their careers and some have never exhibited in an art context before.
This, and the wide range of media used for the works, adds to the multiplicity and the challenging of borders between different realms of cultural production. The work to be presented on the show includes painting, drawing, writing, video, installation, photography, sculpture, and sound.
Examples include a group of five large paintings in which Mandla Mabila, disabled as a result of childhood illness, attempts to understand and come to terms with his adult life by retrieving early experiences.
Antoinette Murdoch’s installation Regenerasie (Regeneration) deals with her experience of the psychological and physical changes of pregnancy against the background of her ongoing exploration of Christian ritual and Afrikaner womanhood.
Veronique Malherbe’s Preserving Purity is a chandelier made of steel, lights and glass bottles containing photobooth photographs that document mother and child through their first year together. Secrets and Lies, Ruth Rosengarten’s block of works, combines images and text that deal with the desire to have a child and the failure of that project.
Colin Richards’s work Can’t You See I’m Burning? deals with the complexity of paternal experience, asking the very complex question of how and with what affects a man becomes a father.
Bringing Up Baby: Artists Survey the Reproductive Body is at the Grahamstown Gallery, Albany Museum, as part of the Standard Bank National Arts Festival from July 2 to 12