Mother of The Year

Marni Kotak

Saturday, August 12, 5-7p

Marni Kotak, "Mother of The Year,” 2023, 10-channel video Installation, dimensions variable, 6 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Microscope Gallery

“Mother of the Year” (2023) is a new video installation by Marni Kotak for her residency at Glasshouse this August involving her embodiment of the maternal body over the first ten years of her Raising Baby X project, which positions the raising of her son as a work of art. “Mother of the Year” incorporates ten larger than life-size video projections of the artist adopting a pose prevalent to that year of Raising Baby X and invoking allegorical goddess imagery from the history of figurative sculpture and painting. It creates what Kotak describes as “a new language of the maternal body,” including but stretching beyond the traditional earth mother and mother and child poses which happen in the first two years of motherhood. 

Each annual video has been superimposed with videos from the corresponding year shot from the point of view of her son, culled from a ten-year project in which Kotak has outfitted her son with a wearable camera to capture his childhood from his perspective. The manner in which the videos are overlaid onto the figure give the sense that Kotak’s body has been constructed out of the moving images, which are cherished memories of her and her son.

Viewers move through the space lit up by five projectors and get a sense of the mother’s role changing as the child grows up over ten years, capturing Kotak’s transforming stances and the child’s developing activities and vocal range. Moving around the perimeter of the space, audience members begin with “Year 1: Birth Ball,” where Kotak squats atop the red birth ball she used during “The Birth of Baby X” in the manner of an earth mother, overlaid with videos of her son playing, crawling and cooing as a newborn to one-year old baby. Audience members then move to “Year 2: Holding Baby,” where Kotak cradles a sculpture of baby Ajax in the traditional mother and child pose, covered in videos shot during Year 2 of “Raising Baby X” when Ajax was one going on two years old. 

In the videos from years 3 through 10, Kotak creates her own contemporary vocabulary of the maternal figure based upon her own personal experiences with Ajax. In “Year 3: Baby Wrap,” the artist imagines holding her toddler in a baby wrap in the manner in which she did when he was two going on three years old; “Year 4: Dusty,” in which Kotak plays with Ajax’s tox of Dusty the airplane which he painted gold from this time period; “Year 5: Cooking,” where Kotak stands offering up a bowl of fruit performing the daily rituals of feeding her son; “Year 6: Teacher,” in which Kotak reads from “The Dangerous Book For Boys” embodying her role as a homeschooling parent and teacher.

Additionally, in “Year 7: Marnitov Cocktail,” Kotak dresses as her alter ego Marnitov Cocktail, a CIA-level artist spy against the Trump administration; “Year 8: Dancing” references Kotak’s “Dancing in the Oval Office” performance and practice of utilizing dance as a method to deal with life's struggles; “Year 9: Love Mask” finds Kotak as the mother during the Coronavirus pandemic; and in “Year 10: Third Eye,” the artist begins to increasingly wear the camera as Ajax grows and develops his own independent photography and video projects.


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Marni Kotak is a multimedia and performance artist presenting everyday life being lived. She has received international attention for her durational performances and exhibitions, most notably “The Birth of Baby X” (2011), in which she gave birth to her son as a live performance, and “Mad Meds” (2014) during which the artist slowly withdrew from psychiatric medications prescribed for postpartum depression. In “Dancing in the Oval Office” (2019), she danced each day within a recreation of the White House Oval Office and most recently, along with her son, she spent five weeks living within replicas of the child's bedroom and the artist's studio as part of the exhibition "Seriously Kidding Around" (2022) at Microscope Gallery, celebrating 10 years of positioning the acts of raising a child and growing up as art. Kotak’s works have also appeared at the Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile; Artists Space, New York, NY; Exit Art, New York, NY; White Box, New York, NY Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY; English Kills Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn, NY; among others. She has performed extensively in the US and abroad.

Her exhibitions have been featured in Artforum, Blouin Artinfo, Art Pulse, The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Times, Studio International, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Time Magazine, Washington Post, among many others. Kotak’s work also appear in books and publications including “The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption,” Bloomsbury (2022); Maternal Performance: Feminist Relations, Palgrave McMillian (2021); The Art of Feminism: Images that shaped the Fight for Equality, 1957-2017, Chronicle Books (2018); and Blackwells Companions to Contemporary Art: A Companion to Feminist Art, John Wiley & Sons (2019), among others. Kotak has appeared on Good Morning America (ABC), CBC Radio, NPR, ZDFKultur, and other broadcasts as well as in the documentary “The Art of Making it,” (2021) currently streaming on Amazon Prime. Marni Kotak received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Brooklyn College.