The research project explores the representation of motherhood in 20th-century visual culture, focusing in particular on the iconography of the pregnant body. Often perceived as unsettling and politically charged, the pregnant body remains a cultural taboo. Despite recent initiatives dedicated to the discourse on motherhood, the maternal body continues to be marginalized in contemporary narratives. The project seeks to challenge the invisibility of the pregnant female body by developing a reading of art history that re-centers reproductive functions and motherhood as key frameworks for interpreting reality. Through an inclusive and diachronic approach, Disobedient Bodies analyzes the representation of motherhood as a site of negotiation between social constructs, female identities, reproductive processes, and postcolonial dynamics throughout the 20th century.

Lara Demori is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institut für Kunstgeschichte.

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The event will take place in the auditorium.
Free admission until capacity is reached.

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Dr. Lara Demori is Scientific Assistant and Postdoctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institut für Kunstgeschichte, where she works on postwar art practices in Italy and Latin America. In 2017, Lara was awarded a PhD in contemporary art history from The University of Edinburgh with a thesis entitled Art Degree Zero: Piero Manzoni and Hélio Oiticica, which is currently becoming a book (Routledge, 2025). Until August 2018 she was Goethe-Institut Postdoctoral Fellow at the Haus der Kunst Museum in Munich where she worked on Okwui Enwzor's project Postcolonial Art, 1955-1980. From 2019 to 2022 Lara was Marcello Rumma Fellow in Contemporary Italian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was then promoted to Research Associate. At the PMA, Lara worked on curatorial and research projects related to contemporary art at large from the post-war period to the present, in particular: Giuseppe Penone, Teresita Fernandez, Andrea Fraser and Nam June Paik.


Cover image: Marta María Pérez Bravo (b. 1959) No matar, ni ver matar animales (Do Not Kill, Nor Watch Animals Being Killed), 1986, from Para Concebir (To Conceive), 1985–86