A group exhibition featuring a mix of contemporary female artists and pioneers of Surrealist photography, the show positions women within the movement in a way that reveals their unique and underestimated contributions. Tracing the movement through time, the exhibition shows how enduring its methodologies are and how urgent its message is. As our world becomes ever more steeped in binary thinking, AI slop, and polarisation, “the works in My Silence Is Made of Explosions reject fixed narratives in favour of images that are unresolved, intimate, and psychologically charged.”
Dora Maar (1907-1997), a French photographer and artist most known for being the muse and lover of Pablo Picasso, was one of the first Surrealists to use photomontage and image manipulation to create these dream-like images which were oftentimes shocking. Overshadowed by Picasso’s work, Maar never received the recognition for her talent, creativity, and ingenuity until in the last years of her life and after her death. In this exhibition, her portraits of Nusch Éluard, a performer and Surrealist herself, show a woman’s face behind a fence as foliage grows around her calm, sun-kissed face. She may be trapped, but she and the leaves are blossoming as much as they can, just like Maar in her relationship and career with Picasso.
Positive Disintegration (2016) from Tania Franco Klein captures another woman possibly trapped — this time in her own reflection. Lying on the floor and reaching out into the warped mirror for her contorted reflection, we don’t ever see her face, only a blurred likeness. As with much of Klein’s work, the face is either turned away from the camera or mediated by a distorted reflection in the scene of a classic suburban home made to represent the American Dream. Her loneliness and psychological breakdown are palpable in the staging and absurd conversation between images, homing in on the emotional brutality of performing a standardized role.
Elena Dorfman’s images expand on this idea of performance, albeit through a very different lens. Her subjects are quite literally objects of performance, focusing on the relationship between people and sex dolls. The photos, taken in the early 2000s, show the plastic dolls lying on a bed dressed in a red slip, or sitting at the patio table, or even in a church pew, praying. Over twenty years later, the images reflect a development of sex dolls that has taken a dangerous, violent turn since the introduction of AI. It is no longer just a piece of plastic where one can enact their wildest, most disturbing fantasies, but a chat bot that can respond, validating and encouraging violent actions. It is profoundly revealing of the absurdity of the male loneliness epidemic and the long road we’ve taken to get to a point where women’s liberation is the scapegoat for men’s lack of growth.
My Silence Is Made of Explosions doesn’t just focus on the experience of women —although our existence is one of the most surreal things a man could ever imagine— but on the fluidity of the human experience, the uncertainty of tomorrow, and the critical need for change. The featured photographers, which also include names like Zanele Muholi, Pixy Liao, Jen DeNike, Aïda Muluneh, and Patricia Voulgaris, expand on the “psychological, political, and aesthetic urgencies of the present” with thematic focuses and technical skill to “transform photography into a threshold between the visible world and interior states of
