Bringing up Baby (1998/9)

Bringing Up Baby: Artist’s Survey the Reproductive Body was a group show that I curated—just a few years after the dissolution of apartheid—in the context of the increased subtlety and complexity being forged between public and private realms in South Africa. The impulse to do so originated in my attendance at several days of open parliamentary hearings on the vexed topic of abortion (held in Cape Town, 1996). The inevitably controversial media and publicity these hearings generated were useful for more reasons than their positive outcome (Freedom of choice was eventually enshrined within South Africa’s Termination of Pregnancy Bill). The open process facilitated a public display that transgressed deeply held, misogynistic taboos surrounding female sexuality, female bodies, reproductive bodies, and the private domain.

I invited artists to participate in this challenge to the boundaries between the public and the private, the personal and the political, and to make work about the terrain of childhood, the maternal or paternal, sex, pregnancy, birth, miscarriage, and other reproductive body experiences.