Unbecoming Presented by The 525, Saskatoon
By Raquel Alvarado
What does it mean to be an “unbecoming” woman? When I was young my mother said to me, “I hope you have a daughter one day who is just like you, so you understand what it’s like.” When I try to recall my own childhood spent plucking and preening, I am struck by a premonition in which I see myself through the eyes of this amorphous future daughter of mine. What will the frantic notes in the margins of my life portray about the woman I was, the woman I am becoming?
Mona Khan, Our Mother, 2024, digital photograph
A new weekend-long pop-up exhibition from local arts collective The 525 aims to untangle and reclaim the title of Unbecoming with work from ten female-identifying artists centered around the experience of womanhood across matrilineal and generational lines. I received a preview of the exhibition from curators Rowen Dinsmore and Molly Schikosky prior to the show’s launch on November 28th, and I was struck by the form of the assemblage on display, all of which recalled for me what the feminist theorist Sara Ahmed might have called “willful women, unwilling to get along, unwilling to preserve an idea of happiness.”
Hannah Alex, Children and Art, 2023, digital photograph
In Stubble, an experimental documentary from Emma Zuck, the artist asks each subject, “When do you wish to be soft, when do you long to be rough, and when are you both at the same time?” As we eavesdrop amongst strangers, Zuck’s lens lingers, highlighting the soft angles of a woman’s neck as she examines herself in the mirror. In Our Mother, photographer Mona Khan transposes multiple mediums of film and technology to create a layered visual history of her mother’s life before and after leaving Pakistan. Photographer Hannah Alex’s series Children and Art finds the artist posed stoically across several rooms in her late mother’s home. We sense that while her mother was vibrant and warm, the juxtaposition of her daughter’s listless body, subsumed by her loss, with this well-loved home feels all the more haunting.
Xiao Han, Mahjong House, 2022, digital photograph
Lastly, I was particularly drawn to Xiao Han’s Mahjong House, a performance and community engagement project centered around connection across cultures and generations. Accompanying the photography is Han’s own recollection of staging the project during her pregnancy while worrying about the future of her artistic self after her transition into motherhood. French writer Hélène Cixous once wrote that a woman was never far from her social role as mother: “There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink.” What then would it mean to resist the title of “good” mother, or even “good” woman? To be open with our grief, frustration, heartbreak, and sorrow. To pay tribute to the tough prairie women that came before us. And, as shown by the artists of Unbecoming, to abandon that which is expected of us, and to write in any ink we please.
Unbecoming is on display November 28 – 30 at 204 Third Avenue South.
The 525: www.the525art.com
Visitors can learn more here.
Raquel Alvarado is a writer based in the Canadian prairies. She writes an online newsletter called Solitary Daughter, and she is a co-founder and editor of paloma magazine.