Birthing the Pluriverse

- Participatory Works from the Birth Rites Collection

The Collection will present a major free exhibition titled Birthing the Pluriverse - Participatory Works from the Birth Rites Collection at Bell House during the Dulwich Festival (8 to 17 May 2027). 

The Colombian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar describes the pluriverse as “a world in which many worlds fit”, a phrase he borrows from the Zapatista movement. Against the Western modern insistence on a single, universal account of what is real, what counts as knowledge, and what counts as life, the pluriverse holds open the simultaneous existence of many worlds, Indigenous, feminist, communal, embodied, relational, each with their own ways of knowing and doing.

Birthing the Pluriverse takes up Escobar’s thinking to open a space in which many ways of approaching birth can sit alongside each other. Western, medical and patriarchal frames are not displaced but held in conversation with feminist, embodied and communal ones, letting new thoughts emerge in the space between them. By picking out participatory and collaborative works, the exhibition decentralises control over what counts as truth and invites visitors to think with, not just look at, the work. The artworks are openings of perspectival dynamics, situations to be entered rather than objects to be viewed, and creative action is put to work to resituate birth, labour and technology. The voices of women, men, medics, birth professionals, midwives and carers are drawn into a broader reality, one in which marginalised and less-heard voices and ways of thinking are given space. The exhibition embraces diverse ways of being, knowing, organising and birthing life.

This exhibition brings together for the first time, the four newly commissioned works from BRC’s three-year partnership with Tommy’s National Centre for Preterm Birth Research and Imperial College London by Sarah Sudhoff, Hannah Conway, Anna Perach and Courtney Conrad, alongside participatory works from the wider collection including works by artist, Judy Chicago from her historically important 1980’s Birth project and many more. The exhibition will be accompanied by a full programme of artist talks, workshops and curator’s tours across both festival weekends and the week in between, with live performances by: poet Courtney Conrad, performing her l commissioned poems drawn from conversations with black midwives and black women on preterm birth, and artist, Leni Dothan’s Venus, Mary, Leni & Me contract series.

Mother and Child by Anna Perach 2025
Axminster yarn, polycotton & plywood, 171 x 80 x 10cm