Galerie Max Mayer is delighted to announce the opening of its new gallery space in Berlin, debuting with Non-Gestational Co-Nursing, a solo exhibition by Ei Arakawa-Nash.
Known for their performances, installations, and collaborative scenarios with artists, musicians, writers, and art historians, Arakawa-Nash engages with the legacies of postwar avant-gardes, including Gutai, Jikken Kōbō, Fluxus in Japan/USA/Europe, and New York performance art from the 1960s to the 2000s. Their practice subverts the repetition of art histories, the commodification of experience, and the desire for authenticity.
Arakawa-Nash's third show with the gallery presents a body of work that offers personal and social reflection on the artist’s new role as a parent. Central to the exhibition is a digitized 16mm film, showing the artist and their partner nursing their children with a chest-feeding device designed for non-gestational parents. By filming various ways of feeding babies, the work challenges conventional ideas of nurturing and presents their own approach to bonding. Where earlier performances such as WEWORK BABIES (Artist Space, New York 2019) and Don’t Give Up(Kunsthalle Friart, Fribourg 2023) engaged with the theme symbolically, the current approach is grounded in lived experience with the artist’s own twins.
In dialogue with the film, the exhibition features four LED paintings that reference early androgynous and performative works by Jürgen Klauke, a pioneering figure in postwar German Body Art. Klauke’s practice in the 70s investigated the mode of patriarchy in Germany, using his own body to question social norms around gender, sexuality, and appearance. Arakawa-Nash uses this historical precedent to support their ideal of queer and inclusive parenting. Incorporating a prosthetic chest-feeding device developed by a Japanese duo (Taikan Hoshino & Osamu Takahashi), the works interrogate fixed roles and gendered expectations surrounding the feeding of babies. Syringes and nasogastric tubes filled with fake baby formula connect the act of nourishment and the question of artistic ancestors. Non-Gestational Co-Nursing offers a first glimpse into the thematic directions Ei Arakawa-Nash is exploring for their upcoming solo presentation at the Japan Pavilion during the Venice Biennale 2026.
