Dolls | curated by Marta Jakimowicz

The enhancing yet distorting mirror-like relationship between young women and dolls of various kinds has always been a complex and multilayered one, full of complementary as well as conflicted contradictions and ambiguities. The continuing need and duress to become like dolls make women turn into ever cute little girls reflecting the expectation of their perennial immaturity from patriarchal society.

Here enter phenomena such as the beauty industry, celebrity and media glamour and temptations of cosmetic surgery which increasingly result in children prematurely assuming adult appearance. As these processes begin to affect men too, both genders have to face prospects of medical or genetic manipulation and the increasing tendency to see one’s heritage, people and issues through the filter of imported but internalized comic strip and animation film characters.

The artists in this exhibition relish as well as critique the many aspects of the phenomenon, analyse it, subvert or parody, and sometimes use as a weapon of defence and protest. Adequately to the subject, their trajectories mediate admiration and tenderness, gravity, light humour and sarcasm, exuberance and revulsion, pleasure and pain, iconic qualities and narrative suggestiveness, natural behaviour and performance…. Excerpts from the catalogue essay by Marta Jakimowicz