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Throughout cultural history, breastfeeding has been many things: it was power, it was doctrine, it was a tool of oppression and an instrument of the state. What is it today? And how far are we willing to abandon our clichéd notions of it?
In her spatial installation Still(Life), the Cypriot artist Penny Monogiou addresses the ambivalences surrounding breastfeeding. Intelligent, moving, powerful, and provocative, cultural, religious, and aesthetic imprints collide. The breast here symbolizes the ambivalence of female body images: between sexualization and motherhood, between public taboo and private duty. Mary as the idol of the breastfeeding mother—who conceived her child as a virgin and is strongly venerated in Cyprus—stands in stark contrast to the scandalous nudes in Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and Olympia (1863). The social and especially the art-historical gaze upon the female breast is voyeuristic, attempting to strictly separate sexuality,...More
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Press Release
Throughout cultural history, breastfeeding has been many things: it was power, it was doctrine, it was a tool of oppression and an instrument of the state. What is it today? And how far are we willing to abandon our clichéd notions of it?
In her spatial installation Still(Life), the Cypriot artist Penny Monogiou addresses the ambivalences surrounding breastfeeding. Intelligent, moving, powerful, and provocative, cultural, religious, and aesthetic imprints collide. The breast here symbolizes the ambivalence of female body images: between sexualization and motherhood, between public taboo and private duty. Mary as the idol of the breastfeeding mother—who conceived her child as a virgin and is strongly venerated in Cyprus—stands in stark contrast to the scandalous nudes in Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and Olympia (1863). The social and especially the art-historical gaze upon the female breast is voyeuristic, attempting to strictly separate sexuality,...More
