Viola Fátyol

Uncanny Mother, 2023 – ongoing

In her ongoing series Uncanny Mother, Viola Fátyol talks openly about the darker and unpleasant thoughts and feelings that accompany motherhood. Based on her own experiences of raising two children, she explores the changes of the female body before, during and after giving birth, the new roles, responsibilities as well as the constant underlying fear and anxiety about the conditions of the newborn. As she puts it: “What an interesting parallel in life that motherhood is always accompanied by the thought of death”. While motherhood is often celebrated for its joyful aspects, the experience of motherhood can bring different, less jubilant thoughts to the surface: this new bodily and mental state could be understood as the death of an old life and an old body. It can inspire you to face your own mortality and to contemplate what might happen to your child in the parent’s absence. But most poignantly, the series addresses the unshakeable—and often taboo—fear of losing one’s child. 

Viola Fátyol takes these uncanny and often repressed thoughts (those that contradict societal expectations of happiness, contentment, and the absence of fear) as her starting point for creating her black-and-white photocollages. In these collages, she often uses art-historical and classical photographic references (like various Renaissance and Baroque depictions of Virgin Mary and baby Jesus) connected to ‘mother and child’ compositions, but deconstructs them in a way that evokes the shadow-side of love and affection. The layered, translucent collages, reminiscent of X-rays, dissolve the contours of the body, transforming the face into skulls or fragment the self into myriad parts. Presented on textile prints, the series, floating in the exhibition space, emphasizes how these thoughts about not only the difficult tasks, but the difficult feelings of motherhood are largely absent in public discourse. On plexiglass, visitors encounter collages made from ultrasound photos, once again turning the internal and invisible (but also medical) towards the outside and into the public sphere.