ダニエラ・コストヴァ、アリーヌ・ミュラー、ゾーイ・マリエ・アーネス、ケイティ・ヘラー・サルトゥーン、白井里実

Daniela Kostova, Aline Müller, Zoe Marieh Urness, Katie Heller Saltoun, Satomi Shirai

Life Is Art Is Motherhood Is Art features photographs by five artists who are mothers: Daniela Kostova (Bulgaria), Aline Müller (Brazil), Zoe Marieh Urness (Alaskan Tlingit and Cherokee), Katie Heller Saltoun (USA), and Satomi Shirai 白井里実 (Japan). Across distinct geographies and lived experiences, their work approaches motherhood not as a private condition but as a generative force that links family life to culture, environment, memory, and collective responsibility.

In dialogue with Kyotographie 2026’s theme, EDGE, the exhibition understands motherhood as a lived threshold—situated between self and other, private and public, care and survival, inheritance and change. Care functions here as both subject and method. Like photography itself, poised between documentation and interpretation, motherhood requires attentiveness, responsiveness to change, and openness to uncertainty. These qualities shape how the artists frame images, engage time, and attend to what is fragile, unfinished, or easily overlooked. Domestic interiors, caregiving, Indigenous communities, transforming bodies, and everyday rituals become sites of knowledge where social systems, ecological precarity, and cultural memory are made visible.

Several works extend care beyond the family unit. Zoe Urness documents Native American life and cultural continuity, presenting care for land, community, and history as inseparable from justice. Daniela Kostova stages family life amid decay, disaster, and improvisation, using domestic roles as rehearsals for survival within unstable social and ecological systems.

Other works explore the edges of identity, home, and becoming. Satomi Shirai examines home as a shifting, unresolved space across cultures and generations. Katie Heller Saltoun treats the domestic interior as a charged threshold between confinement and creation, honoring the labor and emotional density of care. Aline Müller approaches motherhood as a bodily, psychic, and ancestral transformation, embracing fragmentation and the unresolved in-between.

Together, the exhibition proposes motherhood as a creative frontier—where art, ethics, and responsibility intersect, and where attentiveness and interdependence become tools for imagining new ways of living and coexisting in an uncertain world.