Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document: Documentation V, Classified Specimens, Proportional Diagrams, Statistical Tables, Research and Index, 1977 © Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly

Four Works in Dialogue 1973–2010

16.10 2010 – 23.1 2011

Stockholm

Mary Kelly is one of the most influential contemporary artists today. Her project-based work is created in dialogue with the women’s movement of the 1970s as a series of ongoing questions informed by feminism, and she is a vital inspiration to younger artists. Over the years, Mary Kelly has developed a unique way of combining personal narratives with a subtle humour and a critically analytical approach in her large–scale installations.

In connection with Moderna Museet’s project “The Second Museum of Our Wishes”, one part of Mary Kelly’s major ground-breaking work ”Post- Partum Document” (1973–79) was acquired for the Moderna Museet collection. ”Post-Partum Document” was completed over a period of six years and shows how a child, the artist’s son, gradually masters language in a mutual process of socialization between mother and child in the first few years of life. This is the first time ”Post-Partum Document” will have been shown in its entirety in an exhibition in Sweden.

The specifically human environment is
neither biological nor social, but linguistic.
Maud Mannoni

A deep interest in history and time can be found throughout Mary Kelly’s oeuvre. The exhibition ”Four Works in Dialogue 1973–2010” includes ”The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi” (2001), ”Multi-Story House” (2007) and a new work, ”Habitus”, commissioned for this venue. Presenting her seminal project from the 1970s together with the later work, generates an exchange between two moments in history, alternative views of collective memory, different iterations of the mother-and-child relationship and co-incident forms of identity.

There is a secret agreement between past
generations and the present one.
Walter Benjamin