katyaev anton
(ekaterina vasilyeva)

 Azad Asifovich

​​

‘ Who sees? From where do they see? For whom? ’

​

curatorial text on solo exhibition Lactating Bodies by Katya Ev Anton

​

2025

​​

 

Lactating Bodies 20251031–0201 opens as a narrative of lived experiences that artist Katya Ev Anton draws from the body and translates into form. She presents a succession of intimate situations rendered visually, in which milk - this primal substance, almost always hidden from view - becomes a surface for thought, a catalyst of unease, a mirror where childhood gleams through and adults, in spite of themselves, see their own reflection. The artist navigates the grey zone between what one hides and what one reveals, between disgust and indulgence -  the moment when one looks away and the moment when the image insists - reminding us that every gaze is situated, embedded in a body, a history, a power: ‘Who sees? From where do they see? For whom?’ as Haraway might say, when the organic compels theory to go back to matter.

 

The exhibition unfolds like a booklet you can leaf through - forming a visual manifesto, complemented by a protocol and an in-situ intervention. In addition to the artwork presentations there is a hospitality section, conceived as an invitation to breastfeeding people of diverse life experiences, backgrounds and identities. While the West is saturated with the figure of the nursing Virgin -  entrusting the motif of breastfeeding to the brushes of men, which bear the ideology of an immaculate liquid - our contemporary moment hesitates, censors, and diverts. Ev, by contrast, stages and subverts the imaginary of milk, working its representations as both form and thought. They reinscribe lactation into an economy of the visible, where the labour of the body, the politics of care, social relations, and gender identities are continually enacted.

 

Through this lens, milk is more than a nutrient: it is an epistemology in action, a medium of situated knowledge that connects the mouth and tongue to law and contract, the domestic to the public, the icon to everyday life. Drawing on research at the intersection of critical visual culture studies, cultural anthropology, and materialist feminism, Ev opened a dialogue with breastfeeding people whose experiences nourished the project: what classical art sanctifies, Ev desacralizes, rendering it instead both complex and alive.

With Lactating Bodies 20251031-0201, the artist continues on a patient journey: making milk, our first food, a shared space, an active memory, and recognising breastfeeding as labor. 

 

​

Translation from French: Oona Doyle

​

.​