Film screening. The Motherhood Archives

Thursday, 19 March 2015, 19:00
Visual Culture Research Center (44 Hlybochytska Street (1st floor), Kyiv)

Visual Culture Research Center and Political Critique invite you to the screening of film The Motherhood Archives by Irene Lusztig, which will take place on Thursday, 19 March, at 19:00.

Archival montage, science fiction, and homage to 70s feminist filmmaking are woven together to excavate hidden histories of childbirth in the twentieth century. Assembling an archive of over 100 educational, industrial, and medical training films, The Motherhood Archives inventively untangles the complex, sometimes surprising genealogies of maternal education. From the first use of anesthetic ether in the 19th century to the postmodern 21st century hospital birthing suite, The Motherhood Archives charts a course through the cultural history of pain, the history of obstetric anesthesia, and the little-known international history of the natural childbirth and Lamaze movements. Revealing a world of intensive training, rehearsal, and performative preparation for the unknown that is ultimately incommensurate with experience, The Motherhood Archives becomes a meditation on the maternal body as a site of institutional control, ideological surveillance, medical knowledge, and nationalist state intervention. The film works both, as a feminist recuperation of obsolete maternal histories, and as a visual analysis of the persistent disciplining of the pregnant / laboring body.

Irene Lusztig is a filmmaker, media archeologist, and visual artist. Her film and video work mines old images and technologies for new meanings in order to reframe, recuperate, or reanimate the forgotten and neglected stories. Using hybrid formal strategies and combining visual textures (including digital video, Super 8 and 16mm film, and found / archival materials) her work investigates the production of personal, collective, and national memories.

Admission is free

The screening will take place within the frameworks of feminist program that is taking place at VCRC from 3rd to 19th of March

Supported by ERSTE Stiftung, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Ukraine

Media partners:

Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) was founded in 2008 as a platform for collaboration between academic, artistic, and activist communities. VCRC is an independent initiative, which is engaged in publishing and artistic activities, scientific research, organization of public lectures, discussions, and conferences. In 2015 Visual Culture Research Center received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award.

Contacts:

+380631481204 (Nazariy Sovsun)
www.facebook.com/vcrc.org.ua
vcrc@vcrc.org.ua