October 2018. I’m sitting in the garden of the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice—Peggy Guggenheim’s former home, now a museum—staring at Jenny Holzer’s work “Garden Bench”, a very long modular bench sculpted from white stone, engraved with a poem. I froze as I read the following lines—lines I still don’t understand why they struck me so deeply:

“I don’t want

I won’t ask you

I can’t tell you

I lie

I am crying hard

There was blood

No one told me

No one knew

My mother knows

I forget your name”

Three years later, these words still move through me: MY MOTHER KNOWS.

Louise Bourgeois once said: “Art is the experience, the re-experiencing of trauma.” She also said: “All my work, all the subjects, find their origin in my childhood.”

A few months ago, I wrote this instruction-poem, inspired by those of Yoko Ono. It became the starting point for a call for art:

Heal Your Personal Stories

(this is an open letter to your mother)

Sit down at the table.

Take a piece of paper and a pen.

Write:

‘Dear Mom…’

Don’t get up from the table

until you’ve said everything.

The next day, after breakfast,

begin working on an artwork.

And that’s how an exhibition was born.

Wholy Mother is an open letter to the Mother—therefore, to Your Self. It is an “essay” that, had I not managed to direct it in this form, I would’ve had to rewrite in another. Most likely, I would’ve rewritten it.

I’ve been asked many times what this exhibition is about. Everything has to have an explanation—especially in art, where there must be an argument. This exhibition is a poem dedicated to the feminine self, a free force that, when it creates, gives birth.

In a social and cultural context that exploits—rather than explores—loud, performative feminist ideologies, I wanted a silent manifesto for femininity.

Starting from the quintessential symbol of sacred femininity—the Holy Mother, the only female among the saints—I coined this hybrid word: ‘wholy’ (whole + holy). A sacred wholeness. A procession. A ritual.

A woman is a mother, whether or not she physically gives birth.

— Medina Pop