Kathya Ev Anton is a provocative artist, which is exactly why we love her. In her first solo exhibition, “Lactating Bodies”, she addresses a theme widely recognised in religious art (how many Madonna-and-child paintings exist worldwide depicting breastfeeding) but largely taboo in a socio-political context: breastfeeding. Without offending the beliefs of the faithful, the non-binary artist treads the precarious ground of considering “what lactation means in contemporary society and art”. On one hand, the image of the breastfeeding mother as the Virgin Mary has been endlessly reproduced in art. On the other, does society truly value maternal labour? This topic is particularly relevant in Belgium and other Western European countries.

I have always been struck by the hypocrisy: the promotion of breastfeeding in medical institutions, yet the expectation that working mothers leave their three-month-old child to return to work, even though breastfeeding is recommended for up to one year. Privileged to stay at home, I breastfed my son until he was 13 months old and took joy in the tactile connection with my child, who remained healthy until the age of 12, then Covid cam. Thank God, none of the clever pumping devices were necessary for me. Kathya Ev Anton, however, actively engages with all of these breast pumps (even the word itself carries stigma).

At the heart of the project is a speculative gesture: a fictitious employment contract in which a state institution hires a breastfeeding woman on full-time terms, including salary, benefits, and social protection. Based on real legal mechanisms within Belgian law, this document functions as a tool of artistic critique, exposing the invisible economy of care and the contradictions of its undervaluation. The “document” is open for public consultation. It is an extremely thought-provoking and creative performance, prompting reflection on breastfeeding as labour with material, political, and aesthetic significance—rather than simply a biological fact or a cultural emblem of motherhood.

Kathya explores lactation as a space where corporeality, labour, and power intersect. She brings to the public sphere aspects of breastfeeding that are normally hidden or stigmatised: physical fatigue, leaking milk, the unpredictability of the body, and the need for equipment and infrastructure. She deconstructs the idealised, heteronormative image of breastfeeding entrenched in Western visual tradition through the iconography of “Virgo Lactans”, where the maternal body is subjected to religious and aesthetic expectations. Unlike the sacred image of the “immaculate fluid”, Ev restores milk to its materiality, ambiguity, and political density.

Her artistic practice gives visible form to the inequalities surrounding lactation. It challenges the spatial positioning of breast milk: confined to personal spaces such as the home, breastfeeding rooms, or bathrooms, or hidden by devices such as portable breast pumps. Even milk banks, despite their vital role in caring for premature infants, are often marginalised within hospitals—placed in basements, next to utility rooms, waste disposers, or sterilisation units. This spatial marginalisation resonates with anthropologist Mary Douglas’ theories of purity and taboo: once separated from the body, milk becomes an excluded element, materially and symbolically, out of place.

The exhibition owes much to its Parisian curator, Azad Asifovich, who masterfully integrated various media—ranging from painting to performance—into the underground aesthetic spaces of the cultural centre in the Brussels suburb of Strombeek. He wrote the “Lactating Bodies” manifesto, which one feels should be read to the accompaniment of a rousing march. The exhibition is coherent, comprehensive, and engaging, prompting reflection on things we normally take for granted.

Kathya Ev Anton has not yet realised her performance, originally conceived as an event in which breastfeeding women would be generously paid for expressing milk in bright, peaceful galleries—completely in contrast to the isolated basements where they are far too often confined. However, this work, still in development, carries a powerful utopian vision. It is a political proposition, a call to rethink reproductive labour and to reimagine cultural institutions as spaces capable of materially supporting its practice. In a society that extracts so much yet compensates so little, reproductive labour becomes an arena of resistance, where human work transcends its materiality, becoming a symbol of care, a marker of inequality, and a sign of an alternative possible future. Whether any institution will have the courage to bring this vision to life remains to be seen.