Date: 1999 Mowbray Maternity Hospital, Cape Town
Partner: Nina Cohen – architect
Brief: To design an installation for the antenatal waiting area of Mowbray Maternity Hospital, a public health facility in Cape Town
Aim: To gently challenge deeply held and extremely repressive taboos surrounding sexuality and the private domain in contemporary South Africa
Media: Conversation, Photography, Writing, Perspex, Neons

In late 1997, following heated public debate and extensive public parliamentary hearings; freedom of choice was enshrined within South Africa’s Termination of Pregnancy Bill. The tensions and controversial publicity generated by the abortion debate were useful for more reasons than their outcome. The open process facilitated a public display that transgressed deeply held and extremely repressive taboos surrounding sexuality and the private domain. It was at this time, and in the context of the increased subtlety and complexity being forged in the relationship between the public and private realm in South Africa, that this project evolved.

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A version of Maternal Exposures was first made for the exhibition Bringing Up Baby: Artists Survey the Reproductve Body that I curated in 1998. That exhibition included Jane Alexander, Msizi Kuhlane, Mandla Mabila, Daina Mabunda, Bronwen Findlay, Veronique Malherbe, Fatima Mendonca, Antoinette Murdoch, Colin Richards, Ruth Rosengarten, Claudette Schreuders, Penny Siopis, Warrick Sony and Clive van den Berg working variously on childhood/maternal/paternal subjectivity themes.

My project in the context of the exhibition was an installation of a sound work (designed by Warrick Sony) and images that developed out of a 6-month research period spent at the public Mowbray Maternity and Groote Schuur Hospitals in Cape Town.

Hospital administrators and staff visiting the exhibition approached me to consider permanently installing it into their working environment so that it could work together with their maternal health programs. Informed by their brief and extremely lively consultation, and working in collaboration with architect Nina Cohen, Maternal Exposures was redesigned and permanently installed into the densely trafficked antenatal waiting area of Mowbray Maternity Hospital, in Cape Town. It was designed so that it related strongly to the function and uses of this hospital space, and interacted with the public in whom the work originated. The photographs and text derive from interviews I conducted at the same hospital; informal encounters with women who were pregnant, about to give birth or had just given birth. The text alternates between the three principal languages of the Western Cape (Afrikaans, English and Xhosa) and is conversational and informal in tone. It threads through the installation and reflects a broad range of experience and opinion. The tone is conversational and intimate, at times provocative, poignant, humorous, brave, entertaining, sexy, sad and challenging. The text, and the red keywords are another layer, and intended to contradict the so-called ‘documentariness’ of the images, and raise questions about photographic meaning, most particularly about the ways in which photographs of women with children are conventionally ‘read’.

* The title Maternal Exposures is borrowed from Marianne Hirsch’s chapter title of the same name in her book Family Frames: photography,narrative and post memory, Harvard University Press: Cambridge Massachusetts 1997