VIDEO
SARI FISHMAN
DESCRIPTION
The Madonna Lactans—the medieval Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the infant Jesus—has long represented one of the most profound dualities in Western culture: the convergence of the earthly body and the divine. Within this image, Christ represents God incarnate, yet remains entirely dependent on the physical body of his mother for nourishment, intimacy, and survival. The sacred becomes inseparable from flesh, touch, milk, and the maternal form.
In Sari Fishman’s video work, this unresolved tension is reawakened through extreme, visceral close-ups that simulate microscopic, internal bodily imaging. The undulating, textured sculptural surfaces evoke pulsing corporeal tissues, while the viscous orange liquid navigating through crevices and contours directly mimics the flow of biological fluids, internal heat, and the raw mechanics of a sexual act. What initially presents as pure abstraction gradually unfolds as a voyeuristic and highly sensual experience, prompting an unsettling, powerful recognition: the primal bodily gestures of motherhood and breastfeeding are inherently mirrored within human sexuality as sources of intense erotic pleasure. Rather than separating these spheres into opposites, Fishman collapses the distance between them, revealing their shared biological and psychological origin.
Through this intense sensory experience, the work shifts from the corporeal to the existential, marking a transition from absolute devotion and self-effacement—characteristic of both motherhood and religious piety—toward the birth of the desiring subject. At the core of this exploration lies the friction between devotion to an external force and the emergence of the self—a philosophical shift echoing German Romanticism and Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s centering of the "Ich" ("I") as the locus of human experience. Fishman reactivates this historic duality through modern abstraction, bodily memory, and erotic perception. The flowing orange liquid behaves as a living, shifting substance—fluidly oscillating between milk and blood, desire and devotion, maternal comfort and raw material presence.