The projects is "Visualizing the Invisible: The Maternal Turn in Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practices in Central Europe". The principal investigators are dr hab. Justyna Ludmiła Wierzchowska (University of Warsaw), dr Zuzana Stefkova (Charles University), prof. dr Jordan Troeller (Leuphana University Lüneburg).

The project analyses contemporary artistic and curatorial practices that articulate the lived and
situated experience of mothering. Most of the material researched in this project originates in
Central Europe (primarily in Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, and Slovakia) after the 1989
transformation but the research also surveys artworks and artists who engaged with this topic
during the Cold War period. The project focuses on how art practitioners - artists, art groups,
curators, and art institutions - engage with physical, psychological, social, and political aspects of
having and rearing children. The project identifies the ways in which contemporary artistic and
curatorial representations of motherhood contest the institution of motherhood as a site of
oppressive stereotypes. Instead, these practitioners reflect on lived intersections between gender,
ethnic, social, and other identities and forms of embodiment, geographies, power-relations, and
practices, bringing forth the critical potential of non-essentialized and non-normative situated
mothering, including racially othered or otherwise marginalized maternal experiences. Using
critical feminist theory as its methodological starting point, the project looks at how practices of
mothering are reflected in art and curating, and how they in turn transform these disciplines and
art institutions.