Mother Tongue
2017
Single-Channel Video
Edition of 4 and 2 Artist’s Proofs
Dimensions Variable
7:20

A little light enters me. Something inside me begins to stir. Barely. Something new has moved me. As though I’d taken a first step inside myself. As if a breath of air had penetrated a completely petrified being, unsticking its mass. Waking me from a long sleep. From an ancient dream. A dream which must not have been my own, but in which I was captive. Was I a participant, or was I the dream itself—another’s dream, a dream about another?

           One Doesn’t Stir without the Other, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Vivienne Wenzel

Upon coming across a home video that presents both my pregnant mother and myself as a newborn, I perform a drag persona of my mother in order to queer my existence prior to birth, and Mother reciprocates. The exhibition features new photographs, video and installation that depict the two of us in 1991 and in 2017 as we perform our mother child relationship.