“Than Hussein Clark and David Lieske: Anal Peace,” Corvi-Mora, London, 2025

Nowhere else have the paradoxes of motherhood been portrayed more gaily than in RuPaul’s Drag Race. Somewhat like a gallerist, RuPaul selects drag queens whom he supports in competing against one another, whereby a “mother” is an experienced drag queen who mentors younger queens in “families” or “houses.” Both Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan famously point to a maternal duality in which two contradictory mother figures are divided between desire and love; in contrast to caring, nurturing, and protecting are lust and seduction, two antagonistic aspects of the life-giving mother that may be threatening, paralyzing, or castrating.

In Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (ca. 1501–19), which plays a central role in Freud’s analysis of Leonardo’s biography and his (disputed) speculation about the artist’s latent homosexuality, [1] two women – the Virgin Mary and her mother, Saint Anne – appear at first sight as one woman with two heads. The mother and daughter (who look more like twins in the painting) lean over baby Jesus, who in turn embraces a lamb, his figurative synonym. In “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (1912), Freud further depicts a maternal duality that leads (some) men to perceive women as either degraded whores whom they cannot love or holy Madonnas with whom they cannot have passionate sex.

Lacan, too, distinguishes between the “mother of love” and the “mother of desire” within the “female position.” [2] Carl Jung even went so far as to identify the archetype of the “Death Mother,” one who instead of protecting and nourishing turns against life, a tomb-womb reflection to which Freud also alluded.

As if to demonstrate these complementary and distressing oppositions of affection and monstrosity, which are also pivotal to gay culture, the club-kid-style drag performer Vivacious made an iconic entrance in season six of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Her face popping out of a doll’s chest, she called in a raspy voice cheerfully yet with intimidation: “Mother has arrived!”

Presented in “Anal Peace,” the current two-man show by Than Hussein Clark and David Lieske at South London’s Corvi-Mora gallery, Mother Has Arrived (2025) is a play written, designed, and directed by Clark, produced by his collaborative project The Director’s Theatre Writer’s Theatre. For six and a half hours, from the moment the gallery opens to the public for the day, two actors and a prosthetic makeup artist are enclosed in a narrow, neoclassical art-deco-style vitrine made of glass, brass, and steel, placed in the center of the gallery’s main room. This “durational performance” is surprisingly entrancing. And although visitors are free to wander in and out of the gallery at will – unlike the caged actors – and may never fully grasp the multitude of intertwining narratives, characters, and events that gradually unfold through its dialogue, singing, audio effects, and opulent design, it is hard not to be fixated.

Than Hussein Clark, “Mother Has Arrived,” Corvi-Mora, London, 2025

The play unravels the turbulent transformation of Exeter (played by Lewis Blomfield and based on Clark) into “his” mother, Martha Fuller Clark. Now in her eighties, Fuller Clark is a long-serving state senator and vice-chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party. Throughout this process, Exeter and Essex (Benedict Wishart) engage in an elaborate dialogue based on recorded conversations between the artist and his mother, recently discovered recordings of the artist’s father (Dr. Geoffrey E. Clark, 1938–2023), and archival audio of historical events. As they navigate between situations, voices, accents, and characters, they revisit events in US history from the 20th century until today. Clark’s biography and heritage is entwined with US politics, depicted as a chain of violent calamities in which images penetrate and eventually replace reality, from Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, through to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Ronald Reagan, and the AIDS crisis, to Covid and Donald Trump.

Within the sequence of events, a special place is reserved for the loving-strangling, nourishing-castrating mother and gay men. The protagonists are shooting a film and reenact scenes out of Hollywood films such as Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and Psycho (1960). The dialogue also explicitly alludes to the woman-skinning serial killer in Silence of the Lambs (1991), who wants to make a dress of flesh in order to change his gender. All the while, the prosthetic makeup artist (Aurora Beadle) works on Exeter’s transformation, physically transforming the young actor into the elderly matriarch – the artist and writer’s mother.

David Lieske’s Schnittbilder/Cutpaintings I–IX series (2025) – seven canvases with black-and-white inkjet and gouache images – hang on the gallery’s walls, enveloping the stage-vitrine like an embrace. Each canvas is the size of a specific garment from the artist’s tennis court wear label DL – a label that, like many of Lieske’s endeavors, seems to have operated in reality just to fulfil a fictional breadth, in which all of the artist’s activities from DJ to artist to gallerist to fashion designer and back to artist are tied together in a Duchampian knot.

The motifs in the Schnittbilder series demonstrate their graphic nature on the surface, a word that reoccurs in their German titles (Fläche, Oberfläche). In Flächenbezogene Verwischung im militärischen (2025), a soldier kneels at the bottom of the vertical, lightly striped canvas. It is a figure taken from the minimalist cover design of Hans Hellmut Kirst’s bestselling 08/15 trilogy of novels (1954–55), which served as an anchor in Lieske’s recent show “Armed Interpretations” at Oslo’s VI, VII gallery. The novels, which recount the miseries of a Wehrmacht soldier during the Second World War, was titled after the MG 08/15, an automatic machine gun used by the German army in the First World War. The gun’s nationwide manufacturing led to the foundation of the Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN), which to this day sets industry-wide standards for all sorts of goods – the epitome of a military-industrial complex. The success of the eponymous novel-turned-TV series in the 1950s in Germany contributed to Nullachtfünfzehn (“08/15” spelled out in letters) becoming synonymous with mediocrity and dullness in general.

The figure of a child pointing a microphone into the space (or, rather, the surface) in Befragung eines Oberflächenbezogenen Sprechakts (2025) also originates from “Armed Interpretations.” In it, a sculptural arrangement of cables, a microphone, and a speaker surrounded by a cassette recorder plays a 90-minute sound piece, in which an AI-generated voice reads an autobiographical coming-of-age novel, written by Lieske, about a nihilistically bored gay adolescent in an affluent Hamburg suburb in the 1990s. Here, as in Clark’s play, autobiography is used as fiction, based on the obsessive capturing, recording, and collecting of the son-artist.

“Than Hussein Clark and David Lieske: Anal Peace,” Corvi-Mora, London, 2025

While the exhibition squeezes Clark’s grand drama of son-being-swallowed-by-his-mother into a cage (albeit a beautiful one), Lieske’s conceptual embrace of the play – by inviting it into his own show as an artist – perhaps demonstrates the possibility of a good enough mother. Coined by Donald Winnicott [3] (as it happens, the gallery is just off Wincott Street in South East London), against ideals of a perfected “good mother” the good enough mother was Winnicott’s definition of a stable and devoted enough parent who can reflect and hold for the infant a sense of completeness und gradually let go. The two artists have a long history of working together, primarily as artist and gallerist when Lieske ran Mathew Gallery with Peter Kersten from 2011 to 2020. Clark was picked up into Mathew’s roster directly out of art school, and the gallery was the first to organize an exhibition of Clark’s work.

“You are irreplaceable. This is why the life you blessed me with will always be condemned to loneliness,” Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote to his mother in his poem Supplica a mia madre (Plea to My Mother), which was drawn from a diary he kept during the filming of Mamma Roma in 1962 and first published in the poetry collection Poesia in forma di rosa (1964). Pasolini, who ominously cast his mother as the Virgin Mary in his 1964 film Il Vangelo secondo Matteo film, captures in the poem his inexhaustible desire for young men as an inseparable part of the bond with his mother: “And I don’t want to be alone. I have an infinite thirst for love, for bodies pure and soulless,” he writes.

By the time the gallery closes, “Mother” has arrived. A perplexingly satisfying metamorphosis has been completed: Something had to die in order for it to live.

“Than Hussein Clark and David Lieske: Anal Peace,” Corvi-Mora, London, September 4–October 10, 2025.

Tal Sterngast is a writer and curator in Berlin. Over the past 20 years she has regularly contributed to Artforum, Frieze, and other art magazines, as well as to newspapers such as FAZ, taz, Die Zeit, and Haaretz. She has contributed to numerous catalogues and artists’ books, most recently on the work of Stéphane Mandelbaum (MMK) and Raphaela Vogel (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König). Her book Twelve Paintings – Excursions to the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin was published in 2020 (Hatje Cantz). Her essay “Boomerang – Contemporary Art Against the Spectacular Image of History” was published in 2021 (Van Leer Institute Press). She recently curated the group exhibition “It Might Be a Mirage” at West, in the former US Embassy in The Hague (2022). Since 2010 Sterngast has taught at various art academies, including the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and the UdK in Berlin.

Image credits: 1. + 3. Courtesy of the artists and Corvi-Mora; 2. photo Maya Yoncali