Mary Kelly explores the questions of sexuality, identity and historical memory that have prompted her project-based work for over four decades. She considers how these questions are shaped by the discursive site and why her narrative installations rely not only on the story unfolding between words and objects, but also on the viewer’s experience of space.
Mary Kelly’s large-scale narrative installations and theoretical writings have been central to the discourse of feminism and postmodernism since the 1970s. Recent exhibitions include retrospectives at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 2011, and at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2010, as well as representation in the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, Documenta 12, Kassel, 2007, and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007. She is the author of Post-Partum Document (Routledge 1983) and Imaging Desire (MIT Press 1996). She is Distinguished Professor of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles.