Anna Fabricius’s new photo series, *Tiger*, engages in a fruitful dialogue with her earlier work, *Housewife Tiger*, created between 2004 and 2006. Using the method of re-photography, the artist returns to the subjects of her earlier series twenty years later to examine the temporality and shifting layers of meaning in the social and personal experience of motherhood. However, the project goes beyond the media strategy of rephotography: it can be viewed both as a reflexive rethinking of more than two decades of artistic practice and as a repositioning of the theme of motherhood within new contexts.
While *Household Mother Tiger*, as one of the pioneering works of Hungarian contemporary visual art, drew attention to the social construction of motherhood and the normative role expectations weighing on women, *Tiger* focuses on a later stage of motherhood. On the one hand, the images capture the transitional state in which the intense relationship of dependency between mother and child gradually transforms; on the other hand, they depict the period when, with the conclusion of the reproductive phase of life, a woman’s social role also changes. One of the central motifs of the series is the so-called “empty nest” state: the psychological and emotional situation in which, following the children’s departure, previous forms of motherhood and womanhood become partially hollowed out or imbued with new meanings. Fabricius’s photographs depict this state not as a loss, but as a complex, ambivalent experience in which questions of care, letting go, intimacy, and self-identity are present.
The shifts in form and meaning between the two series offer a fruitful interpretive framework for examining the changing social role of motherhood. The time that has elapsed between them has brought about changes not only in the lives of the subjects but also in the artist’s position: the personal experience of becoming a mother has also shaped her creative perspective. The exhibition thus interprets motherhood not as a static role, but as an experience that accumulates over time and is constantly being reshaped, one that is at once personal, intimate, and socially defined.
Viktória Popovics