THEME #14Winners2020AUG

Co-exist

GRAND PRIX

DETAIL

Statement

Mother Motif

“Mother Motif” (2020) What is a mother’s love for her daughter, but all the acts of kindness that hopefully will become learned behaviors and eventually decent as fluid patterns? Through their childhood layers and layers of maternal devotion, cover them like fabric that they will carry for the rest of their lives, a cloak of identity. Trying to keep the best out of it, escaping this unconscious mother’s control, they are struggling to dance their own dance, disrupting the mother.

Profile

Panos Charalampidis and Mary Chairetaki

Panos Charalampidis and Mary Chairetaki are a Greek artist duo, living in Crete. Mary holds an MA degree and Panos has a PhD. They are intrigued by the potential of photographic art to act as a research tool that integrates the inherent evidential nature of the medium, with emotions and the human perspective. They like to be committed to long-term projects, immersing in their subject’s world.

Jury selection

In general, it is deemed that the love of a mother for her own child is something that every woman is born with. Through the repeated representation by the media, such cliche of motherhood has somehow become accepted as the "form" of love and sacrifice by women. However, in reality, are we not uninterested in imagining or observing feminity within the image of a "mother". The reason why Mother Motif is such an interesting body of work is that it meticulously reenacts the notion of motherhood, specifically replaced by the idea of femininity of a mother, using fabric and flowers. The image that our society demands is not the embodiment of motherhood but the image of a woman enveloped by the definition of a mother. I fee that this sense of remedy and vitality are co-existing within this work.