No creation without destruction: images of childbirth and Candice Breitz's Labour

Abstract

ABSTRACT The following essay explores a video installation by Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz (b. 1972) titled Labour (2019) which presents us with graphic images of childbirth in reverse viewed from close up. The work casts light on the absence of birthing bodies in photography, moving images or other forms of visual art presented at art institutions, a topic not reflected upon in academic literature. Also, by portraying childbirth simultaneously as dying and killing, Labour starkly differs from mainstream visual culture representations, which tend to evade the more messy and unruly aspect of childbirth. The author situates the work in the context of recent interventions in theory and literature as well as Labour's feminist art precursors. These art works present us with a fearless, uncensored picture of the reality of childbirth in which the possibility that lives are rerouted, and people are damaged both physically and mentally, is palpable. As testaments of traumatic events that resist erasure from memory, these objects of art dissociate themselves from the present dominant ideologies surrounding reproduction to gesture towards an alternative future in which conditions for reproduction would be radically different.