05/05/2025
🪢 Mothers without Hands: Procession 🪢
An international performance by artist Tereza Bušková
🔸11th May 2025 at 15:00
🔸Brandejsův dvůr, Dvorská 1/3, 165 00 Praha-Suchdol
Multidisciplinary artist, TEREZA BUŠKOVÁ (b.1978, Prague) lives and works in Birmingham. Following a BA in Fine Art Bušková completed an MA in Fine Art Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in 2007. Bušková’s practice deals with ritual, tradition and craft, celebrating and reinterpreting Slavic as well as European customs through the media of print, performance and video.
Tereza Bušková incorporates various often hard-to-reach communities into her intuitive and visionary practice, which is rooted in thorough anthropological research. She engages them through traditional craft and baking workshops inspired by Slavonic folklore. While these traditions form the starting point of her work, Bušková also connects them with elements of British and other European cultures, resulting in performances, films, and images that transcend geographical boundaries and function as mythic narratives that defy temporal classification.
Among Tereza Bušková’s previous community-based projects is The Clipping the Church (2016), which focused on reviving the nearly forgotten English tradition of symbolically “embracing” a church. In June 2016, just 13 days before the Brexit referendum, more than 200 people gathered at St Barnabas Church in Erdington, Birmingham. The performance combined Czech wedding customs with English rituals, creating a powerful symbol of unity within a diverse community.
Among Tereza Bušková’s more recent participatory projects funded by the Arts Council are Hidden Mothers (2021) and Little Queens (2022), both of which explore motherhood in connection with ritual, identity, and community. Hidden Mothers celebrated the often invisible migrant and refugee mothers, while Little Queens, inspired by a traditional Moravian ritual, focused on intergenerational celebration of women and was part of the cultural programme leading up to the Commonwealth Games. Bušková recently exhibited her video Clipping the Church (2016) at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, as part of the Friends in Love and War exhibition in collaboration with the British Council.
Text by Dr Nicola Baird
Direction: Tereza Bušková .buskova
Curator: Dr Nicola Baird
Graphic Design: James Ward / Jiri Busek .busek
More information at https://motherswithouthands.wordpress.com
Photocredits:
Slide 1: Tereza Bušková holding Mothers Insignia, London, 2021, Photo Katarzyna Perlak
Slide 3: Mothers without Hands, Procession, Folkestone, 2025, Photo Carl Gibbons
Slide 5: Clipping the Church, Procession, Birmingham, 2016, Photo Gwynne Gibbons
Slide 7: Hidden Hands of Walsall, Procession, Walsall, 2024, Photo Dee Patel
Slide 8: Ritual of Homecoming, Hidden Mothers, Copeland Gallery, London, 2021, Photo Carl Gibbons
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