Supermother

Photographs in the Supermother cycle show Elżbieta Jabłońska and her son Antek. She takes photos of herself with the child against the background of domestic interiors, and in the posed scenes she is costumed as pop-culture heroes: the Spiderman, Batman or Superman. She thus perceives her role as twofold, of a mother and of a super-hero, and with these two faces she associates a spectrum of stereotypical perceptions and preordained tasks. A mother, perpetually assisting her child in everyday situations, is the opposite of a super-hero, who appears in crisis situations that demand an extraordinary intervention.

The Supermother cycle has been mentioned in reference to the image of “Matka Polka”, that is the Polish Mother, a female figure deriving from the Romantic tradition: a woman who sacrifices herself, and her family, to Fatherland. In visual arts, this figure has found the fullest expression in the cycles of drawings by Artur Grottger, Polonia (1863) and Lithuania (1864–1866). Today, the phrase “Matka Polka” is used, rather deprecatingly, in reference to a woman who is focused on housekeeping and child-rearing, and who is not professionally active. In addition, this image of a mother is overlaid with the image of perfect motherhood, in the Christian tradition embodied by the Virgin Mary. The photograph in which Jabłońska, dressed as the Superman, kisses her son’s cheek refers to a depiction of the Virgin Mary known as Mater Eleusa – the variant in which she presses her cheek to Child Jesus. On the traditional image of a mother, Jabłońska superimposes other images of womanhood as well. The supermother is not only extremely effective in running the house, but does very well outside it, too: she fulfils her ambitions, completes her own plans and satisfies other people’s expectations – not only those of a professional nature, but also the demands disseminated by media; the contemporary ideal of beauty is a case in point. Jabłońska brings to attention the multiplicity of the often contradictory and mutually exclusive roles a woman is expected to play and areas she should succeed in, thus showing how difficult it is, in fact, to be a supermother.

Jabłońska’s oeuvre is usually situated in the context of feminist art, although in fact she distances herself from this categorisation. She underlines that her project is rooted in her own experience and in her observations regarding the functioning of a family. Yet her oeuvre has a universal dimension, imparted by the autobiographical aspect of her work which reflects the mundane life of the majority of modern-day mothers. Although Jabłońska does not perceive her situation as oppressive, it would be hard to deny that there is a clear critical aspect to her work, revealed in her penetrating analysis of social roles and cultural conditioning.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz