TaikaTalk with Magdalena Kallenberger
Magdalena Kallenberger is an artist, writer and researcher based in Berlin, Germany, working with video, photography, performance, installation and text, most often in a research-based, collaborative manner. Her work investigates themes around resistance, radical care and motherhood.
During our conversation in the summer 2026, Magdalena has just finalized a long process with her PhD research “Working in/with/of MATERNAL FANTASIES: Artistic Research as Connective Practice” at Bauhaus University Weimar. The research focuses on her work with the artist collective MATERNAL FANTASIES where she is an initiator, co-founder and an active member. In her research, she examines the infrastructures and artistic methods the art collective has built to integrate children, care work, and emotional labor into the artistic process. For Magdalena, becoming a mother herself brought to light the reduced representation of motherhood and the invisibility of the care work in the arts and beyond.
When and why did you start working with the topic of motherhood and care work in the arts?
Before starting my PhD in Germany, I lived and worked as an artist for seven years in Cairo, Egypt. Before moving to Egypt, I had worked on a documentary film covering the social changes through the Green Wave Movement in Tehran. So I have a long-term interest in social change and social movements. I was always interested in the individual’s place in society and how to create social change collectively.
I became a mother during my time living in Cairo. I was completely surprised by how it changed how people perceived me within the art and cultural scene. In 2017, I decided to return to Germany and initiate a new art collective, now called MATERNAL FANTASIES , focused on the topic of motherhood(s).
My pre-doctoral research had concluded that motherhood is simultaneously a biographical reality, a mechanism of structural exclusion, and a discursive vacuum in both academia and the arts. Further, Germany ranks among the last positions in Europe when it comes to structural forms of discrimination like the gender pay gap, the care gap, or the motherhood penalty. Looking up these statistics in my early research helped me conclude that I am not addressing a personal problem, but a structural one.
We all know it needs a village to raise a child or children. However, most images in historical or contemporary art depict the mother-child dyad, revealing how individualistic motherhood remains the prevailing narrative, at least in the Western context. I did not see myself in the images I found. Where were the ambivalences, the mixed feelings, the sleepless nights, all the complex realities of mothering?
I wanted to create new images. As one of my first projects around this topic, I started a photographic working series called “Me and the Boy”, where I include my son. It’s kind of collaborative, but of course I am the artist, and he is the child. In all my work, I use myself as a placeholder for many people’s stories. So, in the pictures, you don’t see our faces.
When you started working with this topic it was not on trend yet at all. What was the status of this topic back then in the art world and wider society?
I started preparing for the PhD in 2017 by looking up worldwide all the exhibitions and artworks I could find that exist around the topic of motherhood. I noticed periods of visibility, then 20 years of nothing. It seemed that no one cared about this topic, especially in academia and the arts. I contacted all female* professors working in the field to supervise the theoretical part of my work and could not succeed. So the supervisor of my project was actually male. No female* professor wanted to tackle the topic because it was just not in fashion. In their understanding, it might have even compromised their career if they were related to the topic of motherhood. I know from my interviews that many artists before my generation even hid the fact that they have children.
When I returned back to Germany after 10 years of living in the Middle East, I was shocked by how backward the society was. Everyone from the MATERNAL FANTASIES collective confirms the same. We all thought when we studied at the most prestigious art academies and graduated with honors, all opportunities were open for us. We thought that we had reached a certain level of equality as women* in society. But after we became mothers, all of them closed. When I became a mother, people in the art and cultural circle asked about my child but no longer considered me a serious artist. And I didn’t know who I was anymore, or who I wanted to be. Now, I know, there is a name to describe this process of identity transition. It is called “matrescense”.
How is it to be a mother and an artist in the same body?
Most artists graduating from art academies are trained for exhibition spaces, often white cube scenarios and everyone is super perfectionist. If the shooting of a scene does not work on the first run, you do it again and again, till it satisfies you. However, my collective work with the children made me realize the absurdity of that perfectionism. With MATERNAL FANTASIES, often we have just the possibility for a one time shot. For example, we have a scene in our experimental short film Suspended Time, on Caring (2020), where there’s this beautiful, choreographed image of us all in a sand dune. Suddenly, my three-year-old son, tap, tap, tap, stumbles in front of the camera. So, this is a mistake. But on the other hand, he broke the 4th wall in the film, by walking by accident through the image and in front of the camera. This opened up questions of how our fantasies and realities collide.
In this process of involving the children in our collective work, we had to open ourselves to these new influences and possibilities instead of sticking to a strict script. Our questions transformed into how to work differently. How to include improvisation interruption, and failure, and still bring the work to a very high-quality level.
So, there is an act of letting go of some control?
Since the Enlightenment, the individual is perceived as an autonomous subject, free of relational burdens, kind of fixed and in control. Then, with motherhood, you realize this image of the autonomous, individualistic artist-genius is false. There are all these interdependencies among us, and they are inspirational.
Many women are surprised by this process of matrescence that they experience after becoming mothers. I am really surprised how little is spoken about the neurological changes our bodies undergo. In general, from the artistic and academic perspective, both the artist genius and the scientist in his tower are an illusion. Thomas Mann, a famous German writer and Nobel Prize winner, could not have done his work if his wife had not taken care of their six children and everything else. This is important in my work: to get some visibility for the networks supporting you, both on an infrastructure level and on a personal level, practically and spiritually.
What have you learned from having the kids around? How do they influence the work?
In MATERNAL FANTASIES work, for the first project we built body extensions from papier-mâché. The mothers built cones that cover their ears, so they get some silence. Or they built something that stabilizes them, that they can lean on, recover, and regain strength. The kids built wings and oversized paws. This is exactly the beauty — how the different realities can be in the same image, and they are not contradicting each other. Art is an amazing tool for dreaming, speculating, and imagining other worlds.
Another concept that comes up in your work is “care”, or more precisely “radical care”. What is radical care?
Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese define radical care “as a set of vital but underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds”. In this sense, the infrastructures that we have built with the MATERNAL FANTASIES collective around our rotational production model are a practice of radical care because they include re-negotiation and adaptation. We ask: what would you like to contribute to this project? Can you contribute considering your personal family situation, your capacities, interests, and skills? We need to consider things like emotional labor, care labor, financial resources, and privileges. In my opinion, this consideration- the ability to switch perspectives and to work from a position in flux- is a radical practice of care.
Do you have an example of a project that you see as a good example of your entire body of work?
The easiest is to talk about MATERNAL FANTASIES work again. For example, we use collective automatic writing as a tool. Everyone writes autobiographically, but then the text becomes collective material as someone else edits it and yet someone else performs it. Through this style, you can stop the self-censoring. Emotions, experiences, and other things that you might not address publicly become collective material and somehow disappear in the collective body. Yet because of the collective presence with the artworks, the materials become somehow hyper-visible.
Now that you have worked for a long time with these topics and produced new kinds of artistic imagery around motherhood, what kind of change have you seen?
I notice more exhibitions coming up around the topic Europe-wide, and also in North and Latin America. There are also more artist residencies that try to facilitate that you can bring your children along. When we started MATERNAL FANTASIES, other groups were founded around the same time for the same reasons. They are all part of the Caring Culture Lab, a community-driven center for equity and care work in the cultural sector.
In 2017, when I contacted, e.g., the Goethe-Institut Tokyo, about the possibility of bringing my infant son along to a 6-month residency, they responded that it would just be possible for my family to join for a couple of days of my residency. Now there are more opportunities for artists who have care duties. However, institutions and people sometimes forget that changing these things takes a lot of work.
At the academy of the arts (Akademie der Künste) in Berlin, there was a curatorial tour where the curator announced that they now have residencies where artists can bring their child. It was announced as if it were a change that “just happened out of nowhere.” I was like: “Stop – it did not just happen.” So many initiatives have been working on that change. I was shocked at how fast this was forgotten again. This connects to my previous interest in social movements and the question of how history is written, how history is rewritten, who falls out of the history books, and why.
One could say that the word “care” has become quite trendy in the art world and there are many ambitious projects around the concept. Can there be downsides to such a concept becoming popularized in a way?
I can share another anecdote. Around 3 years ago, there was a symposium at Akademie der Künste around the exhibition “Care and Repair” with a talk by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who wrote the Manifesto for Maintenance Art in 1969. I was there with my child. I asked the organizer where to find the location of the childcare. The answer was that there is no childcare. So, there was a symposium on the Care Manifesto without childcare. There was a Q&A afterward where I raised this issue. The organizer approached me afterward again saying: “but I thought we had already talked about this, that there is no childcare at this event.” I responded that I did not want to address this issue on a private level; I wanted it audible in the Q&A, recorded officially, and changed for the next event. I don’t want to solve things on personal levels when it’s an institutional insufficiency and structural problem.
Is your work with MATERNAL FANTASIES often considered mainly social practice, or does it also find other avenues?
The biggest challenge I had from the beginning was my vision to leave our domestic spaces, work in art residencies and in our art studios together, and bring our art to a Gallery/museum level. Social practice art is very important, but I have always said that this is not exactly what we are doing in the collective. In the beginning, we were invited to do many workshops for institutions, the same institutions that did not include our artistic works in their exhibitions. And it was impossible for us to get funding for such an art collective, with so many people, including the children.
Now seven years later, we have reached a place where we are not merely exhibiting in project spaces. Our work is included in the big group show at KUMU, “Who is Afraid of Motherhood” in Tallinn, Estonia in November 2026. Our film was part of the screening program of the touring exhibition “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” curated by Hettie Judah and touring the UK 2024-26. It was also part of the “Handle with Care” exhibition at Ludwig Museum, Budapest, and other shows e.g. Kunsthalle Bremen, Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen etc.
We often end up talking about topics that deal with social issues, such as those around motherhood, from a problem-focused standpoint. I’m interested to hear also about the pleasure in your work. What brings you joy?
That is an excellent question, because I didn’t consider it at the beginning, when I started working with the others in the collective. I’m from southern Germany. We have a strong puritanical work ethic, where there isn’t much fun in the work. Working with the collective and including the children in the work process invited us to use fun, pleasure, and play as core methods. Our work is very precarious as artists, and we need at least to have fun doing it and feel the pleasure of doing something together. This idea was born out of my research on Adrienne Maree Brown, an afro-american feminist and her work on pleasure activism. She talks about how to use pleasure as a tool of resistance. Fun, pleasure, and play are our political methods to counter the existing state. They are an absolutely powerful force.
Magdalena Kallenberger, talking in this interview as herself, not as a representative of MATERNAL FANTASIES, was interviewed by Silja Tuovinen in Itu Artlab, August 2026.