Explication:

The exhibition “Mater Materia” is dedicated to the aesthetic understanding of the experience of motherhood by women artists.

The works presented at the exhibition make viewers think about how social stereotypes influence the realization of modern women's rights, including sexual and reproductive rights. Does society impose the role of mother on women and for what purpose? How important is it for a woman to listen to herself, to her body and mind? What social and visual patterns shape our understanding of motherhood? What aspects and sides of the maternal experience are taboo for us?

From Latin, the name of the project “Mater Materia” can be translated as “Mother Matter/Mother Substance”, which, according to the organizers, refers, on the one hand, to the primary, essential significance of the figure of the mother, and on the other hand, to her constant reduction to the role of consumable material, depersonalization, identification of a woman with her biological function.

The “Mater Materia” project is an important and unique opportunity for Belarus to look at the experience of motherhood in all its diversity of manifestations: personal, lived and experienced, or potential, possible-impossible, abstract; traumatic, enriching, frightening, inspiring or destructive.

The exhibition does not feature stereotypical visual images of women and clichés. Instead, we see a woman-human being – at the same time omnipotent and helpless, acting as a creator and material in one person, feeling strength and experiencing uncertainty in herself and others, experiencing fear and despair, strong and at the same time in need of support and attention to understand that all these feelings are worthy of understanding and respect.