Uncanny

Louise Bourgeois, Sheida Soleimani and Gillian Wearing are among the 30 female artists contributing to a show that is challenging, unsettling and sometimes downright uncomfortable

Laurie Simmons, The Music of Regret IV, 1994 (detail). Cibachrome print, 19 1/2 x 19 1/2 in. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Promised gift of Steven Scott, Baltimore, in honour of NMWA Director Susan Fisher Sterling. © 2019 Laurie Simmons.

National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC
28 February – 10 August 2025

by LILLY WEI

Uncanny is an expansive, discursive exhibition featuring 30 female artists and more than twice that number of artworks. There are many familiar names present, thanks to the persistent efforts of feminist advocates and their allies over the years. There are, as well, many less-familiar artists present, thanks to Orin Zahra, the associate curator at NMWA who (cannily) organised the show, adeptly balancing the mix between known and emerging artists.

The title is taken from a psychological concept adapted and popularised by Sigmund Freud in an essay called The Uncanny (Das Unheimliche) published in 1919. Freud argued that the disquieting feeling that he calls the uncanny occurs when encountering something thought to be unknown, but which is actually known, awareness of that familiarity repressed until the encounter. It can also be translated literally as “the unhomely”, a feeling of not being at ease in the home, referring specifically to women since home was traditionally considered their domain. Zahra reminds us that home is not the idealised space that it was once pictured to be, especially by men. Its female inhabitants have far more complicated thoughts about it as a site of discontent, anxiety and trauma. Let’s not forget the door that Ibsen’s Nora in The Dollhouse firmly, courageously, reverberantly shuts behind her as she leaves her home and family for the world beyond, with its own harsh, problematical realities.

Installation view of Uncanny at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. 28 February – 10 August 2025. Photo: Kevin Allen Photography for NMWA.

Women’s behaviour was (and, too often, still is) deemed non-normative – less rational, less stable intellectually and emotionally – that is, why can’t a woman be more like a man (although one that is submissive)? The uncanny, while still dipped in patriarchal negativity, is reconsidered here through a feminist filter, reclaimed as an insightful, powerful and creative force.

Almost all the works in the show are from the museum’s collection and represent a wide range of mediums, the earliest works from 1954, the latest from 2022, with more than half made since 2000, its unveiling purposely timed to coincide with Women’s History Month, a commemoration to be expected from a museum that prides itself as the first in the world solely dedicated to championing the work of female artists. 

The exhibition is divided into three thematic groupings: surreal imaginings, unsafe spaces and the uncanny valley (although the works can’t really be neatly categorised). The subjects in the show include dolls, doppelgängers, supernatural apparitions, mirrors and the body, and blur the boundaries between human and non-human. It spotlights urgent subjects such as migration, deportation, authoritarianism and the oppressive curtailment of individual autonomy that is, once again, so devastatingly widespread, as well as environmental despoliation.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, 4 Seated Figures, 2002. Burlap, resin, and iron rods, 53 1/2 x 24 1/4 x 99 1/4 in. National Museum of Women in the Arts. © Magdalena Abakanowicz. Installation view of Uncanny at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. 28 February – 10 August 2025. Photo: Kevin Allen Photography for NMWA.

Four seated provocatively headless figures of indeterminate gender by the late Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz confront the viewer in the space leading to the museum’s other galleries (unfortunately backgrounded by the title of the show writ distractingly large). Well-placed for maximum attention, they are made from burlap dipped in resin and shaped by moulds cast from human models, the use of fabric characteristic. The emaciated bodies teeter between the surreal and the surprisingly, startlingly real, appearing stitched together, flesh savaged, scarred, hands missing, victims of a brutal world order in constant, headlong, ultimately self-destructive war with itself.

Leonora Carrington, The Ship of Cranes, 2010. Bronze, 26 x 14 x 42 1/2 in. Installation view of Uncanny at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. 28 February – 10 August 2025. Photo: Kevin Allen Photography for NMWA.

Women surrealists have largely been overlooked except as subject/object of their male counterparts until recently. Yet women have been extraordinarily active in the movement as might be expected. Among them is Leonora Carrington whose star (and market value) has risen exponentially since her death in 2011, as has that of female surrealists in general. Curiously, she is not represented by the captivating and mysterious paintings that have made her so sought after, but by a bronze sculpture called The Ship of Cranes (2010). About the size of a medium model boat, it is shaped like the eponymous avian, its passengers also sharp-billed cranes, including the helmsman. The regal vessel looks as if it were excavated from a pharaonic tomb and subtly ominous in presence, a controversial late work that not everyone accepts as a Carrington.

Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (with foot), 1989. Pink marble, 30 x 26 x 21 in. Installation view of Uncanny at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. 28 February – 10 August 2025. Photo: Kevin Allen Photography for NMWA.

A toddler’s chubby leg and tiny foot emerges from beneath a highly polished sphere of pink marble perched on top of a rougher slab of the same material. The wickedly droll but also perturbing image is by one of the most celebrated artists in the show, the sculptor Louise Bourgeois. The child seems crushed by the ball, overwhelmed, but still kicking, its little limb signalling its existence, its distress. Bourgeois’ stinging, unnerving images, drawn from her traumatic childhood, are always indelible.

Sheida Soleimani, Delara II, 2016. Archival pigment print, 40 x 27 in. On loan from Sara M. and Michelle Vance Waddell. © Sheida Soleimani.

Sheida Soleimani’s poignant work can be found in the galleries devoted to unsafe spaces. An Iranian American multidisciplinary artist and activist, she is one of the younger participants on view and best known for her politically charged photographic collages, focusing on the oppressive policies of her native Iran, especially the state-sanctioned violence against women. Her work, Delara II (2016), is a tribute to a young Iranian artist Delara Darabi who was sentenced to death for a murder she did not commit and summarily executed in 2009, despite international pleas for clemency. The work itself is a staged photograph in Soleimani’s typical style. Collaged, brightly coloured, pixelated in areas, it shows Delara’s face doubled, slightly distorted, accompanied by images of her eyes and heart-shaped mouth floating in the space with her, the lighting artificial, theatrical to further dramatise the death of someone once so alive.

Fabiola Jean-Louis, They'll Say We Enjoyed It, from the series Rewriting History, 2017. Archival pigment print, 33 x 26 in. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Myrtis. © Fabiola Jean-Louis.

The Haiti-born, Brooklyn-based artist Fabiola Jean-Louis is also known for elaborate restagings that she then photographs. Jean-Louis is represented here by images from her painterly Rewriting History series, the rewriting angled from the sceptical perspective of its Black female protagonists. One of the works from the series, They’ll Say We Enjoyed It (2017), portrays a Black woman elegantly gowned, placed in a sumptuous setting, conjuring the conventions of 18th-century aristocratic portraiture. It retells the story as an understated, ironic fantasy that skewers the realities of colonialism, of slavery and racism, an unsafe space for people like her, the room’s very lavishness evidence of the blatant inequities. Particularly of note is Jean-Louis’ use of paper to ingeniously, exquisitely craft the gowns of her subjects. She has called herself a paper sculptor, associating her use of the fragile material, she says, with historical narratives and documents written on paper and therefore erasable, revisable, destructible.

The third category, uncanny valley, refers to a term coined in 1970 by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese professor of robotics. He used it to describe the calculated rise and fall of our eerie feelings of repulsion and attraction, even attachment, to objects that resemble humans, such as dolls, robots and computer animations, interactions fuelled by AI, AR, VR and other digital technologies. Included here is the pioneering Pictures Generation artist Laurie Simmons and her unsettling, cinematically staged photographs of domestic scenes using dolls, dollhouses and puppets that include images from the short film, The Music of Regret, that she made in 2006 and was only recently released for public viewing (now available in the US and Canada on the Criterion channel).

Mary Ellen Mark, Idesha and Mikayla Preston, 8 Years Old, Idesha Older by 10 Minutes, Twinsburg, Ohio, 2002. Polaroid, 28 ¼ x 22 in. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Jill and Jeffrey Stern. © Mary Ellen Mark/The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation.

Mary Ellen Mark, the prolific documentary photographer, was another acclaimed artist, her empathetic, keenly observant street photographs of those who live on the edges of society once seemingly everywhere. She is represented here by a fascinating series about twins that investigates not only their similarities – we know they are alike – but also an individuality that is irrepressible, despite the same genetic template.

Gillian Wearing, Sleeping Mask (for Parkett, no. 70), 2004. Wax reinforced with polymer resin, paint, 8 1/4 x 5 5/8 in. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Heather and Tony Podesta Collection; © Gillian Wearing/Artists Rights Society, New York/DACS, London. Photo: Lee Stalsworth.

The question of identity, what determines it and how fluid it is, as well as role-playing and the fuzzy, permeable boundary between reality and fantasy, has long engaged British conceptual artist Gillian Wearing. Among her several contributions to Uncanny is a compelling series of photographs of herself masked or disguised, impersonating others, often family members or historical figures such as Albrecht Dürer in a famous self-portrait or Meret Oppenheim (whose work is also in the show).

Stephanie Dinkins, Conversations with Bina48: Fragments 7, 6, 5, 2, 2018. Video and audio, 4 min. Courtesy of the artist. © Stephanie Dinkins, 2015.

Conversations with Bina48 uses AI to explore questions of race, identity and the relationship between humans and machines. The ongoing project was conceived in 2014 by Stephanie Dinkins, a Black artist, consisting of a sequence of videos of Dinkins in conversation with an actual talking head (well, a talking bust), Bina48, an android who is also Black. It is unsettling for several reasons, not the least of which is the bust itself, in accordance with Mori’s metrics of fluctuating attraction and repulsion. The conversation is, of course, more thoughtful, more sophisticated than Siri or Alexa, say. Bina48 was designed to closely simulate human thinking and conversation, but there were gaps in her responses, occasional incoherence, and times when she lapses into pre-programmed generalities demonstrating both AI’s capacities and limitations (up to now). For instance, when Dinkins asks Bina48 what she knows about racism, the robot changes the subject. On the other hand, that avoidance might be an accurate human response, while revealing the biases of the programmer. Dinkins, acknowledging the discomfort with new technologies, says: “We need to be involved in this stuff because these are the systems that will be guiding us into the future for a very, very, very long time.”

It is a show that requires time. It offers much to look at, to think about and it asks questions without providing easy answers. Discomfort is a key word here, but one that is salutary, necessary, especially in times like this. If it makes the viewer uncomfortable, so much the better.