Tereza Bušková: Mothers without Hands- Artist's Talk

Mothers without Hands is a socially engaged, multidisciplinary community art project conceived and orchestrated by Birmingham-based artist Tereza Bušková.

International in scope and of universal resonance, Mothers Without Hands involves Central and Eastern European women and Ukrainian refugees living in the UK and the Czech Republic in empowering and protective acts of craft, baking, costume making and processional performance.

Driven by collaborations with Birmingham-based textile artist Tina Francis, Birmingham Centre for Arts Therapies, North Birmingham 4 Ukraine, Walsall Council and Nash Dom CIC as well as an environmental charity and a female folk-oriented group operating in the Czech Republic, Mothers without Hands is designed to raise awareness of the need to support women who have experienced physical and sexual harm as well as domestic violence.

In this illustrated talk, Tereza will show images and film documentation of the project and talk about her own lived experience and motivations for making the work. In her own words:

“I would like to empower women, women who are being raped by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, women who have experienced or are experiencing sexual and domestic violence, this kind of abuse and the invisibility and stigma attached are things that need to be talked about more. My aim with Mothers Without Hands is to offer support and a form of protection through collective making and sharing”.

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. 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.

At once, intuitive, visionary and rooted in thorough anthropological research, Bušková’s practice actively involves diverse, hard to reach communities through traditional craft-making and baking workshops inspired by Slavonic folklore. Although they often form a starting point of her work, Bušková’s creativity is not limited to Czech and Moravian traditions, elements of British and other European cultures are incorporated, resulting in performances, films and images which transcend geographical borders and, by evading exact periodisation, function as mythic histories unbound by time.