Rereading. Post-Partum Document. Mary Kelly

For the first time the seven sections of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document were shown in their entirety in an exhibition in 1998, the Introduction as well as Documentations I-VI, all created from 1973 to 1979. For this occasion, the Generali Foundation published an expanded version of the first edition of Post-Partum Document which has been published in 1983 and was out of print for some time. The exhibition also featured works that are closely related to Post-Partum Document, the film Antepartum (1972–73), the photo series Primapara (1974). In addition, material from Mary Kelly’s archive was brought together by Juli Carson and grouped in eight showcases according to thematic reference. Parallel to the exhibition at the Generali Foundation, lectures on the concept, context as well as the historical and current reception of Post-Partum Document were organized. The present publication includes these contributions along with other texts.

Post-Partum Document is one of the seminal works of the seventies. Some 22 years after the controversial reception of the exhibition of Documentations I-III at the ICA in London, Post-Partum Document is once again playing an eminent role in the current discourse. Issues of conceptual art, on which Kelly has taken a provocative position, as well as the representation of the (female) body in art can be addressed anew, using Post-Partum Document as a point of departure. On the other hand, the socio-political aspects of this work have generated new interest.

This seven-year artistic project is grounded in the theoretical and political practice of the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s in Great Britain. At that time, Mary Kelly was living in London. As a founding member and first chairman of the Artists Union, she was involved in forming the “Women’s Workshop”—a group of artists who made alliances with women in other professional fields. Women and Work, the result of a two-year study of the sexual division of labor in a metal box factory in south London, was one of the projects that emerged from this initiative. It was shown as an exhibition in 1975 at numerous locations in Great Britain. Within this discursive context, Post-Partum Document evolved over a relatively long period. In each phase of the artist’s work it is possible to trace the theoretical positions reflected on by Mary Kelly at a given moment within the emerging feminist discourse.