Visualizing the Invisible: The Maternal Turn in Artistic and Curatorial Practices in Central Europe

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Jordan Troeller
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 564205796

The project analyses contemporary artistic and curatorial practices that articulate the lived and situated experience of mothering. Most of the material researched in this project originates in Central Europe (primarily in Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, and Slovakia) after the 1989 transformation but the research also surveys artworks and artists who engaged with this topic during the Cold War period. The project focuses on how art practitioners - artists, art groups, curators, and art institutions - engage with physical, psychological, social, and political aspects of having and rearing children. The project identifies the ways in which contemporary artistic and curatorial representations of motherhood contest the institution of motherhood as a site of oppressive stereotypes. Instead, these practitioners reflect on lived intersections between gender, ethnic, social, and other identities and forms of embodiment, geographies, power-relations, and practices, bringing forth the critical potential of non-essentialized and non-normative situated mothering, including racially othered or otherwise marginalized maternal experiences. Using critical feminist theory as its methodological starting point, the project looks at how practices of mothering are reflected in art and curating, and how they in turn transform these disciplines and art institutions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Czech Republic, Poland
• Partner Organisation: Czech Science Foundation
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Zuzana Stefková, Ph.D.; Professorin Dr. Justyna Wierzchowska