The Doll (Second Series) 1938

Curator: Hans Bellmer’s work from 1938, called *The Doll (Second Series)*, hangs before us here at the Tate Modern. Bellmer crafted these unsettling images through photography and photomontage. Tell me, what's your immediate reaction? Editor: Haunting. And also a little… adorable in a weird way? I mean, these fragmented doll parts arranged like stills from a disturbing stop-motion film, evoke a peculiar nostalgia, something broken but still trying to be loved. It's as if the trauma is cute. Curator: Trauma often is repackaged in surprising ways. What interests me most here is the symbolic resonance. Bellmer constructed these dolls as a commentary on the rise of fascism and the manipulation of the human form, especially the female body, within oppressive regimes. It really encapsulates something. Editor: Yes, like the photographs are hinting at how bodies can become objects, literally disassembled and rearranged to serve a political ideology or to fulfill the artist's or someone else's own strange fantasies, but I get this strange playful subversiveness here too. Curator: Precisely. These photographs of fragmented bodies remind us of the dangers of idealizing and objectifying the human figure, it evokes both disgust and allure, the familiar and strange coexisting in one uncanny frame. What are your thoughts on his surrealist technique? Editor: I think there is more than meets the eye to them. They show an intentional unsettling nature. These images are not accidental by any means, I love it! Bellmer is playing with form, light, and shadow to create something really unnerving. Curator: A lot can be found in just playing with the simplest parts of anything really, isn't it? The dolls also touch on Freud's concept of the uncanny – that sense of something familiar yet disturbingly unfamiliar. What kind of feelings did it trigger? Editor: Pure horror, in a strange way I am addicted to see more, but in general I would feel deeply shaken, vulnerable. It is very complex. Curator: "The Doll (Second Series)" stands as a stark visual testament to the human condition. Its fragmented form and symbolic layers offer reflections about human behavior in society and relationships between us, I think. Editor: It sure does, and perhaps it also has the possibility to inspire something different as well; not all that bad...