04 Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency

Dr. Marcus Bunyan reviews this exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago

… i saw a review of the show a while back, made me wish i could afford to get to Chicago…

This is a harrowing exhibition. In reality, in the 21st century, it shouldn’t be, for the problems that it investigates – the psychological, physical, and emotional realities people encounter in the years leading up to, during, and after fertility; the lack of open acknowledgement of pleasure, the lack of access to abortion, trauma, and the loss of fertility – should not longer exist. Women’s bodies are not vehicles for reproduction as see through a patriarchal, capitalist lens.1

_“I’m trying to visualise a history of misogyny so we don’t forget what’s in the past and don’t get too comfortable in the present; so we take a look at things that sometimes we don’t want to – in a visual way that doesn’t make you just turn the page but makes you engage somehow and think a little bit.”2


  1. Dr. Marcus Bunyon: https://artblart.com/2021/05/15/exhibition-reproductive-health-fertility-agency-at-the-museum-of-contemporary-photography-columbia-college-chicago/ ↩︎

  2. Laia Abril, via Dr. Marcus Bunyon: https://artblart.com/2021/05/15/exhibition-reproductive-health-fertility-agency-at-the-museum-of-contemporary-photography-columbia-college-chicago/ ↩︎

Of Sports, Asian Women, and Volleyball

… last article to review today, a pretty rich morning… appealing to my interest in the state of womanhood, this documentary on Nichibo Kaizuka, a women’s volleyball team which rose to fame and cultural icon status because of their winning ways… they were dubbed the “Oriental Witches”… there is so much to unpack in that moniker alone… titled The Witches of the Orient, it is on view at Doc Fortnight, which requires an expensive MoMA membership to view, but if you are already a member, or maybe you should become a member, most of the fee is tax deductible…

Reading about Pixy Liao

… i read about Pixy Liao’s staged photographic work calling into question the patriarchy and its notion of the place of women… it has been getting a lot of attention… there is currently an exhibit at Fotografiska in New York City… one of her images:

After Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, Experimental Relationship series, 2019, © Pixy Liao1

… the incorporation of this work into the gallery and museum art system is the beginning of its absorption into the patriarchy and neutralization of its message as noted by Abigail Solomon Godeau in quoting Walter Benjamin in Photography at the Dock:

We are faced with the fact… that the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication can assimilate astonishing quantities of revolutionary themes, indeed, can propagate them without calling its own existence, and the existence of the class that owns it, seriously into question2

… this has a tendency to neuter the message… it is interesting as Asian art too, given the Atlanta shootings, it clearly is in opposition to the myth that woman, particularly Asian woman, is/should be passive/submissive…

… Godeau, in discussing the work of Connie Hatch, notes that her work is not easily commodified, existing primarily as performative slide shows, which makes the neutering of its message difficult… Godeau notes:

To refuse to supply the apparatus, as Benjamin and Brecht enjoined, may in fact be possible only by affirming one’s place in the peripheral spaces outside the emporium of high culture.3


  1. https://www.fotografiska.com/nyc/exhibition/your-gaze-belongs-to-me/ ↩︎

  2. Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanavich 1978), 228 ↩︎

  3. Abigail Solomon Godeau, Photography at the Dock, University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p 193 ↩︎