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ABSTRACT
The following essay explores a video installation by Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz (b. 1972) titled Labour (2019) which presents us with graphic images of childbirth in reverse viewed from close up. The work casts light on the absence of birthing bodies in photography, moving images or other forms of visual art presented at art institutions, a topic not reflected upon in academic literature. Also, by portraying childbirth simultaneously as dying and killing, Labour starkly differs from mainstream visual culture representations, which tend to evade the more messy and unruly aspect of childbirth. The author situates the work in the context of recent interventions in theory and literature as well as Labour's feminist art precursors. These art works present us with a fearless, uncensored picture of the reality of childbirth in which the possibility that lives are rerouted, and people are damaged both physically and mentally, is palpable. As testaments of traumatic events that resist erasure from memory, these objects of art dissociate themselves from the present dominant ideologies surrounding reproduction to gesture towards an alternative future in which conditions for reproduction would be radically different.
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Notes
1 Heji Shin's Baby series and Carmen Winant's My Birth are two significant recent interventions in the US art world confronting their audiences with explicit childbirth images. While the former is explicit about challenging the invisibility of birthing bodies in culture and about its indebtedness to the empowering and birth-positive rhetorics of second-wave feminism, the latter is ostensively not interested in the feminist discourse, it focuses solely on the babies’ heads emerging from the birth canal which, unlike in Breitz's Labour, it cuts out of context of the birthing scene and the birthing body.
2 Moyzes is partly Jewish and partly Roma and has always thematized her identity in her works openly. The heart of the matter was not just the portrayal of her birth. It was also the self-portrait of the racialized mother giving birth to her already racialized child. Moyzes's intervention makes visible how birth is at once an intimate experience and a political battlefield where class, gender, and race matter. (It was only three years after it took place that the Czech state officially expressed its regret over the legally sanctioned involuntary sterilization of Romani women (1979–1993)). Her act is an act of defiance against how birthing bodies are located within fields of interlocked power relations of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy which further determine the social (un)acceptability of the visibility of birthing bodies based on their class and race.
3 New works in mainstream cinema break new grounds. Such is for example Pieces of a Woman (2020), directed by Kornél Mundruczó, which begins with a 24-minutes long one-take home birth scene (turned tragic), an unusual strategy that stands out of the usual elliptic, fragmented depictions of birth in cinema.
4 As Jennifer Scuro argues, to take care of and be solidary with those who experience the end of pregnancy differently than is expected (as miscarriage, abortion, etc.), we need to free ourselves from ableist assumptions and acknowledge all the complicated ways in which pregnancy takes place and its various outcomes (Citation2017, xii).
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Tereza Stejskalová
Tereza Stejskalová is a contemporary art curator and Assistant Professor of Art Theory at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Her research focuses on post-socialist visual culture from feminist and postcolonial perspectives. Her recent publications include ‘Online Weak and Poor Images: On Contemporary Visual Politics’, in Photography Off the Scale: Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming in 2021), and ‘Filmmakers of the World, Unite! Forgotten Internationalism, Czechoslovak Film and the Third World’ (tranzit.cz, 2018), editor.