Gisèle Vienne: Delving into the Unsettling in Ourselves

What is a doll? A double and a projection. A memento of the weirdness in our bodies. But, they are also a political instrument, of both submission and rebellion. Dolls subtly explain to us how we should behave and dress, how our bodies become beautiful and desirable. Desirable to who? To the patriarchal society that wants us to stay in certain boxes, but especially that doesn’t want us to be scary or to change their set of rules.

Dolls become revolutionary this way. They put in response some fear and restlessness in our minds and bodies. Gisèle Vienne, a Franco-Austrian artist, has made this her goal. Vienne’s teenage puppets welcome us to a world of disturbance and unsettlement. They explore the repressed, the subconscious and the traumatic in ourselves: bodies impacted by the society they live in – troubling and troubled at the same time.

Georg Kolbe Museum

Georg Kolbe Museum until March 9^th, 2025 pairs them with puppets created by avant-garde women artists from the 1900s, in the exhibition I know that I can double myself. Gisèle Vienne and the Puppets of the Avant-Garde. Most of the artists presented belonged to the Dada movement, and used puppets and dolls as instruments to question the society they lived in.

Dolls became for all of them a metaphor of the objectification of women, both in their daily life and in the art world. They were as well a means to question and mock the stereotypes around them. The artists lived in the interwar years, a moment of cultural upheaval, and their work mirrors the cultural changes of their time.

Paired with the contemporary sculptures of teenagers done by Vienne, their work speaks about an unsettled humanity and questions our conception of it. Vienne’s puppets look like they are alive, yet they are immobile. Their stillness and alienation examine us as human beings, making us realize there actually is no real detachment from what we go through. Alongside with the sculptures, Vienne presents in the museum a movie, Kerstin Kraus. It is a disturbing story about a ventriloquist and her dummy, that projects on us all the anxiety and the complexity of our psyche.

Haus Am Waldsee

Germany is showcasing Gisèle Vienne for the first time, and three art spaces have partnered to present her work. Haus Am Waldsee has a solo exhibition on her, titled This Cause Consciousness to Fracture – A Puppet Play, open until January 12, 2025. The exhibition presents both her sculptures and her photographic work, the latter done in partnership with the artist Estelle Hanania.

Their portraits take us to an unfamiliar space in our minds. They look like us, yet they are not us. They are scary, yet so charming. The choice to depict all her puppets during teenage years comes with a specific reason. Those are the years when our inner self is formed, with its rebelliousness to family and social structure. But it is also the time in our life when we are confronted with them. Their subtle input begins to impact us.

Sophiensaele

The artist would like the public to experience her exhibitions as a performance, welcoming movement in still objects and sound in silence. This come as no surprise, since Vienne also works with theatrical, filmic and performative pieces. One of them, Crowd, was performed at Sophiensaele from November 13–16^th. Defined as a performance on an emotional state of emergency, it depicts the stories of people belonging to the counter-culture, showing us new possible ways of being.

 In such a world where we are witnessing so many concerning things happening around us, the artist is maybe trying to leave us with a feeling of hope. Unsettling as all of her work –  but of hope, still. Something we really need right now. Staring back at the dolls as they stare at us now gets an even deeper sense. It becomes a way to look at ourselves in a troubling but sincere way.

More infos on the exhibition program here