The faces in Gisèle Vienne's 40 Portraits (2003–2008) are not alive, and they know it. Pallor, glazed eyes, motionless mouths—sometimes bloodstained, sometimes tear-streaked—these are the silent faces of dolls the artist has been fabricating by hand since 2003, photographed here with the gravity usually reserved for human subjects.
Vienne is a visual artist, choreographer, stage director, and photographer whose theatrical works tour internationally, often in collaboration with the writer Dennis Cooper. Much of her work circles adolescents—teenagers in rupture, "martyrized by others as much as by themselves," as one text puts it—impenetrable figures who are nonetheless unprotected. Rather than using only live performers, she began building dolls and mannequins to populate her stage pieces. They are not inert props. They are presences—beings that, in this photographic series, step out of the theatre and stand before the camera as ambiguous, posing figures, somewhere between childhood and adulthood, between the living and the inanimate.
What you see are sad Lolitas, sometimes caked in heavy makeup, who shift across the series into androgynous beings and then into something closer to death. They "come to life in a teenage attitude, voices muffled—all clues hinting at a culture of violence, repressed yet haunting our myths of innocence and purity bathed in white." The philosopher Elsa Dorlin, writing about Vienne's dolls, puts it viscerally: "the color of anguish grabs us by the throat, twists our guts." You feel it. The whiteness of these faces is not purity. It is the color of something endured.
The trap of 40 Portraits is its complicity. You look at these dolls and you become a voyeur—but the voyeurism "becomes a trap for a direct confrontation with the scabrous object of our imagination." The dolls ask what they can tell us about ourselves. "What tales are told? Tales of defilement, of injury, dolls disfigured by indifference, desire, and salacious laughter." The exhibition, which accompanied Short Theatre 2022 throughout its entire duration, insists that you not look away.
In these forty handmade faces—each slightly different, each carrying its own particular damage—Vienne has built something rare: a body of art that addresses domination, suffering, and public shame while remaining hauntingly, unsettlingly beautiful. The boundary between the living and the inanimate collapses, and what remains is the unmistakable universe of an artist who has spent two decades making objects that refuse to be merely objects.
