The Subversive Icon of Pregnancy in Opposition to the Culture of Fear

Abstract

This paper problematizes the subversive icon of pregnancy and offers a linear overview of its various iterations in juxtaposition to the culture of fear, starting with Vlasta Delimar, whose installation Pregnancy (Trudnoća, 1987), inscribes her in the feminist and women’s art history of the Yugoslav/Croatian context as the first domestic artist who employed photo-documentation, or photo-performance, to document her own pregnancy. She performed her pregnancy in the manner of a goddess, sexualizing it by means of the Baubo pose. Next, the paper addresses the interpretations of the subversion achieved by the pregnant belly in Sanja Iveković’s work Lady Rosa of Luxembourg (2001). The sequence is further contextualized by the distressing confessional of Martina Križanić, a younger generation artist, who visualized the subversive representation of motherhood (Changing Booths, installation, 2017) from her own perspective and without fear, in the first local exhibition about pregnancy Woman – Pregnant Woman – Mother: Green Spheres and Necropolitics (Žena – trudnica – majka: zelene sfere i nekropolitike, Vladimir Bužančić Gallery, Zagreb 2017, curated by Anita Zlomislić).