An adoptee searching for her birth mother. A daughter trying to converse with her immigrant mother. A journey that began as individual films by Kayla Tange and Caroline Yoo, evolved into Dear Mother, a visual and aural group exhibition dedicated to motherlands, mothers, and mothering.
Through sculpture, video, performance, poetry, and painting, collective questions arise. What role does the ‘mother’ play in our lives? How do borders haunt and control, when a nation is no longer viewed as home? What are the physical and emotional labors of making visible the invisible? Throughlines of love and sacrifice blur the constructed ideas of motherhood and motherland.
Dear Mother, creates a conversation between artists with diverse experiences of motherhood and politics of migration in relation to body autonomy in chosen, adopted and biological relationships. The works expose previously kept secrets, shifting the private to public, re-defining societal shame in both literal and abstracted form. The artists reimagine childhood and reclaim family history as sacred mythology, transmuting their lived experiences through pieces that act as containers for memory.
Curated by Kayla Tange and Caroline Yoo
Including work by Jerri Allyn, Se Young Au, Chantal Barlow, Roxy Farhat, Luka Fisher, Chuck Hohng, Wednesday Kim, Lau Hochi, Julayne Lee, MATERNAL FANTASIES, David Noel, Norma Hernandez Peña, Nicole Rademacher, Pranay Reddy, Sheree Rose, Kayla Tange, Huidi Xiang, Kim Ye and Caroline Yoo.
