1st edition, 2005–2007, Margaret Salmon

Ninna Nanna shifts the realm of representation […] from the idealized and the iconographic into the realm of the real.
Bina Von Stauffenberg

For the inaugural edition of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, winning artist Margaret Salmon (b. 1975) focused on the theme of motherhood and how it is portrayed in contemporary Italian society. Ninna Nanna, the piece that grew out of this investigation, is a triptych of black-and-white and colour films shot in 16mm.

Ninna Nanna, Salmon’s winning project for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, is a video triptych that shows three young mothers in their homes as they interact with their children and go about the routine of everyday life. Each of them is seen repeatedly singing an old Tuscan lullaby, Ninna Nanna Fiorentina.

Margaret Salmon’s six-month residency was divided between the American Academy in Rome, with the support of its director Carmela Vircillo Franklin and Italian ambassador Giancarlo Aragona, and Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, where the artist completed her project.

Ninna Nanna

Whitechapel Gallery (25 January – 11 February 2007)

Collezione Maramotti (2008-2009)

The exhibition, which first opened at Whitechapel Gallery in London, presented a triptych of colour and black-and-white videos shot in 16mm; they depict the home life of three different Italian mothers as they sing an endless lullaby to their babies. The work celebrates the grace and tenacity that these women show in their everyday routines, highlighting the contradictions between the idealized iconography of motherhood and the reality of it.

Despite the similar settings and situations, Salmon’s gaze lingers on the small details that distinguish these women from each other and give a sense of their individuality, despite the usual stereotypes about “mothers”. One of them sits alone in thought, absent-mindedly rocking the pushchair, while another carries her child around, kissing and talking to the baby and taking it to bed with her. Two of the women are wearing nightgowns and robes for most of the time, while the third is always fully dressed; she is the only one who ventures out of the house, preserving a degree of independence from her new role as a mother and keeping up contact with the outside world.

Salmon’s chosen medium is video. While her early works were clearly inspired by the documentary tradition and by American literary Realism, her use of a handheld camera, real-life settings and non-professional actors for Ninna Nanna has echoes of Italian Neorealist cinema. The triptych format evokes Federico Fellini’s “Trilogy of Loneliness” or Rossellini’s “War Trilogy”; specifically, it calls to mind Rome, Open City (1946), in which the extraordinary antiheroine played by Anna Magnani is the antithesis of the Fascist image of women as obliging mothers and housewives. Other cinematic influences include Hollywood dramas such as Jean Negulesco’s Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) or Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s A Letter to Three Wives (1949), which follows the stories of three completely different women connected by a single narrative thread, just as the three women in Ninna Nanna are linked by motherhood.

In 2007, Ninna Nanna was selected for the exhibition Think with the senses, Feel with the mind: Art in the present tense, at the 52nd International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Robert Storr.