The series of Mari Mahr’s works currently on display in the Edlis Neeson Research Space at Kettle’s Yard focuses on a series entitled Lili Brik, made in the early 1980s. What are your earliest memories of your mother working, what was her studio like, and did she involve you in her work?
My first memories of her working probably date back to the late 1970s when Mama returned to studying photography (she had been a photographers’ assistant at a news agency in Budapest prior to this – she was this tiny young woman, lugging around the huge lenses and bulky equipment of the all-male sports photographers!) In the UK she enrolled at the Polytechnic of Central London under Victor Burgin and spent three years there. I was instantly her model and appeared in many of her early and student series. It was just her and me in those days, so in between I would sit under her desk as she worked on her after school assignments.
Later, I spent hours with her in her darkroom. It was tiny – a small loo at home that had been gutted and converted – just barely enough space for her to stand in and for me to sit on the floor. She’d often faint from the fumes. She also converted her bedroom into a photography studio space by day. This was still pre-photoshop, so all of her work was set out like mini film sets, hand-crafted and meticulously put together.
Mari Mahr drew upon a wide range of image-making practices in her work, including the use of found imagery, and some of the images we see in the Lili Brik series depict members of your family. How did your mother talk about the use of such images? And how does it affect your personal understanding of her work?
Well, the bulk of Mama’s work deals with the history of my family and a personal sense of relationship. Her own mother had been a refugee, and mama had been born and raised in Chile, while we moved to the UK from Hungary, and in so doing had to leave the rest of our family behind. These huge migratory journeys and the sense of existential insecurity that they gave rise to makes its way into all her work. Apart from this, we appear scattered throughout her other works. I don’t know what led Mama to mine all this so deeply but as an adult looking back on it all, I can easily guess that she was clearly processing the deep questions that her life had given rise to.
Your mother grew up in Chile before returning to Hungary – from where the family had originally emigrated – to study, before moving again to the UK. How did she speak about travel and migration, and do you think this experience influenced specific projects?
Yes, absolutely, it was central to most of her pieces. But you know we also tried desperately to assimilate in our day-to-day existence. So, it infused every conversation and yet no conversation. Every action and yet no action. It was the unspoken about silent weight that dominated everything. But it was always so strongly present in her works – Daughter of an Architect (about my Bauhaus trained grandfather’s life in Chile), Between Ourselves: Time for Sorrow, The Dreamers Birthday: Life Chances, New Place New Codes. All of these show a sense of trying to get to grips with what our family had lived through.
The Lili Brik series was one of three that Mari Mahr devoted to historical figures of interest to her personally at the time, which she recalls discovering through the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Can you remember any more of Mahr’s artistic heroines?
Oddly enough Mama and I rarely discussed her work in this way. I was too young during most of her active years, But I do remember she fell in love with the magical realist writers for a while. And then there was her passion for Cinema (my father was a film director) and particularly the Soviet filmmakers. There was a very strong sense of men dominating our landscape – and she worked incredibly quietly around all that really.
Has your mother influenced your own work as an artist?
Both completely and not at all. Isn’t that always the way! Mama and I have always been so very close. We survived everything together. But we’re also very different people. Mama has a technical brain – she never needed a light meter to get her exposures just right, and she raced towards the computer age with abandon. She’s mathematical and precise. I’m much more about social and emotional connections, humanitarianism and relationships (probably reflective of the fact that my grandma, a lifelong humanitarian, had largely raised me in Hungary before we came to the UK, something that was common in Hungary at the time). I sidled up to artmaking from years in anthropology, theatre and the social sciences, and it’s this that forms the backbone of my practice.
Explore the display
This display in the Research Space brings together photographic works made in 1982 by Kettle’s Yard collection artist Mari Mahr (b. 1941, Chile, lives and works in London) from her Lili Brik series. The series focuses on the Russian artist and author Lili Brik (née Lilya Yuryevna Kagan, 1891-1978) who was part of the literary and artistic avant-garde in Russia from 1914, and to whom the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky dedicated many of his works.