Window to a Mother

Mille Kalsmose in collaboration with Alberto García-Alix

Window to a Mother is an intimate and visually powerful exploration of the idea of motherhood — not as a biological given, but as a constructed, desired, and emotionally charged relation. In this multimedia work, Danish artist Mille Kalsmose, in collaboration with renowned Spanish art photographer Alberto García-Alix, reimagines the mother-daughter bond through performance, portraiture, and personal narrative.

The work revolves around the extrapolated sensation of having a mother — a speculative longing that emerges from both personal loss and universal desire. Through a series of staged photographic portraits and reflective texts, Kalsmose and García-Alix explore what it means to create, imagine, or perform the maternal bond.

At the heart of the project is a radical and deeply personal gesture: years after the suicide of her biological mother, Kalsmose initiates a real-life adoption process with a woman she has chosen to be her new mother. Together, the two women inhabit familial scenes — imitating other mothers and daughters in their homes — and thereby question the boundaries between fiction and truth, memory and invention, performance and real emotional connection.

Each photographic window functions as a threshold — a frame through which the figure of the mother becomes increasingly visible. As viewers move through the series and engage with letters from other daughters about their maternal relationships, both Kalsmose and the audience come closer to understanding what it might mean to “have” a mother. This evolving clarity is mirrored in the structure of the work itself: the further one moves into the narrative, the more defined and emotionally legible the mother figure becomes.

The work asks:

• Can the mother-daughter relationship be formed by will, rather than by biology?

• What does the maternal represent — emotionally, culturally, psychologically?

• Is the mother a person, a memory, an image, or an idea?

By placing herself on stage and inviting the viewer into this process of emotional and social construction, Kalsmose destabilizes one of our most taken-for-granted familial roles. Window to a Mother confronts the tension between the idealized cultural image of motherhood and the lived reality of its presence — or absence — in the lives of daughters across the world.

Supported by the Danish Art Council and the Catalan Culture Institute, Window to a Mother is a contemporary inquiry into human connection, identity, and the power of self-directed transformation.

Catalogue text by:
Anne Jerslev, Professor, PhD
Department of Media, Cognition and Communication
University of Copenhagen