HOLDING BOTH unfolds as a conversation between Maria Hatling and Paloma Tendero, a sustained meditation on inheritance, reproductive agency, and the embodied formation of womanhood. Situated at the intersection of biology, memory, and cultural expectation, the exhibition approaches reproduction not as a singular story but as a field of negotiation shaped by desire, grief, responsibility, and choice.
At its core, Holding Both considers what it means to inherit. Inheritance here exceeds the genetic: it encompasses gesture, language, silence, care, and the quiet transmission of values and wounds across generations. It is material and immaterial, visible and unseen. Using these layered forms of transmission, the artists make visible the ways in which decisions around motherhood, whether to pursue, refuse, mourn, or redefine it, are never made in isolation, but within dense networks of history and belonging. Hatling’s paintings and experimental printmaking operate through accumulation and erasure. Layered surfaces and gestural mark-making evoke the trace of handwriting, an intimate index of presence and absence. Her practice renders grief and tenderness as entangled states, staging a delicate tension between control and dissolution. Through this visual language, she reflects on motherhood, adoption, and care shaped by expectation and memory.
Tendero’s photography and sculptural installations position the body as a mutable archive, marked by biological knowledge and social conditioning. In On Mutability, recycled egg cartons are transformed into fragile, multiplying forms that reimagine fertility as adaptation rather than perfection. Working with mutation, transformation, and vulnerability, her work challenges dominant biomedical and aesthetic ideals of the “healthy” or “complete” body, reframing fragility as a generative condition.
Together, Hatling and Tendero resist binary positions. Motherhood emerges as both fulfilment and loss; childlessness as both freedom and ache. Rather than resolving these tensions, Holding Both sustains them. The exhibition invites viewers to inhabit contradiction, to consider inheritance as an ongoing process through which identities are shaped, negotiated, and reimagined across time.
