2025

Mixed media installation, 

Video 34:22 min, cotton canvas dyed with madder root.

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Cast: Marie Flarup Kristensen & Birgitte Flarup.

Sound design: Frederikke Maria Krebs Bahn.

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Mor er et teater (Mother is a Theatre) is a video work exploring the mother-daughter relationship as a shifting and performative dynamic, shaped by both personal experience and cultural narratives. The work presents a cast of symbolic characters, each representing fragmented versions of the mother and daughter: the rebellious teenage daughter, the overbearing Raven Mother, a ghostly Colette, the towering and devouring Mother-Woman, a mocking mirror-daughter, and the Greek goddess Demeter, who fuses the two into a single, earthworm-like being.

These figures blur the boundaries between self and other, interior and exterior, challenging fixed ideas of maternal identity. The work was developed in close collaboration with the artist’s own mother, whose contributions — particularly through drawing and storyboarding — helped shape the narrative structure and visual language of the piece. Drawing on Luce Irigaray’s theories of the speaking body and the subterranean nature of maternal inheritance, the film examines motherhood as a constructed role — a kind of theatre — and opens up new ways of understanding intergenerational intimacy, conflict, and embodiment.

The work is supported by Blixfonden.

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Installation views AFGANG 2025 (curated by Rebekka Laugesen), Det Fynske Kunstakademi, Odense, 2025.

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Photo Malle Madsen.