The Maternity Ward exhibition features photographs by Kerstin Hacker, the Course Leader for Photography at Anglia Ruskin University, and is part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.
Hacker took the photographs over a period of two months at the Vinohrady Hospital, a large teaching hospital in the centre of Prague, while she was at FAMU (University of Applied Arts in Prague).
The series gives an insight into the busy maternity department of the hospital and challenges the romantic narrative surrounding childbirth.
The uncompromising images won Hacker the Emma/Agfa Prize for Female Photojournalists in Germany in 1993.
German-born Hacker said: “The photographs were taken in 1992, while I was living in what was then still Czechoslovakia.
“As a woman I was interested in the romanticised narrative surrounding childbirth. I was able to spend two months on and off at the hospital and spend many hours observing the daily routine of childbirth.
“This year’s Cambridge Festival of Ideas theme ‘Power and Resistance’ was an ideal time to show the work again, as the work discusses existing power structures in a maternity ward and how women often feel disempowered during labour.”
The Maternity Ward exhibition is on show at the Changing Spaces Gallery on Norfolk Street, Cambridge, from 19 October to 1 November (11am-5pm).
Changing Spaces is an artist-led project in Cambridge that negotiates the use of empty commercial property for use by artists for exhibition and development purposes.
Cambridge Festival of Ideas
Established in 2008, Cambridge Festival of Ideas aims to fuel the public’s interest in arts, humanities and social sciences. The events, ranging from talks, debates and film screenings to exhibitions and comedy nights, are held in lecture halls, theatres, museums and galleries around Cambridge. Of the over 250 events at the Festival, most are free.
Further information can be found at: www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk
Facebook: www.facebook.com/cambridgefestivalofideas
Twitter: @camideasfest #cfi2015
*******
For more press information please contact:
Jon Green on t: 01245 68 4717, e: jon.green@anglia.ac.uk
Jamie Forsyth on t: 01245 68 4716, e: jamie.forsyth@anglia.ac.uk
___________________________________________
Romantic narrative of childbirth challenged
15 October 2015
A powerful series of photographs chronicling childbirth in a Prague hospital in the early 1990s will go on show in Cambridge next week.