by If you’re planning to take a child to Brisbane’s new hit Fairy Tales exhibition, I suggest you go see it yourself first. How’s your son with dripping blood, twisted toenails, and inflatable sex dolls?
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Fairy Tales, now at the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art (Goma), features more than 100 works of art, including sculpture, installation, painting, photography, animation, video art and film props and costumes. Strange and wonderful as all cautionary tales should be, it is thought-provoking and very much aimed at adults, although we should never underestimate children’s appreciation of fear and wonder.
There’s plenty of both in Fairy Tales, a show that traces the artistic history of European fables and folklore, both its kaleidoscopic fantasies and its supernatural horrors. Upon entering the exhibition, the white walls of the gallery begin to slide as the tree branches pass through them with violent force. An installation of splintered, lumpy wood by Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira forces visitors to dodge overhanging branches while inhaling the sweet smell of freshly cut Brazilian plywood and locally sourced driftwood.
“The idea of forests is that they are uncontrollable environments that push you on a quest for adventure,” says curator Amanda Slack-Smith. She points to Charles Perrault, the 17th-century author considered the founder of fairy tales at the French court for his stories, including Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Perrault, he says, considered the forest a metaphor for the “bad intentions” that lurked in the streets waiting for vulnerable young women.
Beyond the forest, we see the oldest work in the exhibition, Gustave Doré’s oil painting Little Red Riding Hood from 1862, in bed with a wolf in a grandmother’s hat. It’s the moment before he devours her. Next to it is American artist Kiki Smith’s 2002 feminist retelling of the same story, Born, a lithograph with the girl and grandmother emerging unharmed from the wolf’s belly.
A few steps away, two red concave mirrors by Anish Kapoor, a 2018 work titled Red and Black Mist Magenta, make visitors reel.
“Wow, that’s too much,” said a woman, quickly walking away from the scene. In the reflection, your face may jump toward you, or you are suddenly upside down or small, with other visitors looming behind you. You must stay very still if you don’t want to fall. “The mirrors in fairy tales sometimes tell you that you are not worthy,” says Slack-Smith. She’s not wrong.
One of the highlights of the exhibition is American artist Trulee Hall’s Witch House (Umbilical Coven Session). It’s a full-sized cabin covered in slimy-looking black tree roots, or maybe worms. Visitors enter one at a time. “The artist says it’s a clubhouse for witches,” says Slack-Smith.
The interior is lit with small flickering candles and adorned with black dream catchers, upside-down baskets, black fur, more worms and, perversely, inflatable black sex dolls. A video shows indescribable things coming out of a hole; a seance is taking place.
It is possibly the most disturbing part of an exhibition that is already packed with nightmare fuel: images of distraught and lost children, long human hairs with minds of their own, poisonous mushrooms or post-coital trolls enjoying a tender, sleepy embrace.
Some of the most charming parts of fairy tales include scenes from a child’s imagination. Jim Henson’s huge puppets from Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are look huggable (don’t even think about it), and David Bowie’s costume from his 1986 film Labyrinth is also… huggable. “I’m pretty sure some of his DNA is in this costume,” Slack-Smith jokes. “Don’t tell me otherwise.”
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The funniest piece is a paper animation titled You Were in My Dream. Made by Australian artists Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine, it invites visitors to place their face in an oval hole and find themselves immersed in a series of brief adventures. You’re a boy chasing a handsome rabbit through the woods, only to transform into a panting dog, and then a wolf, and… Oh my God! You can expect the worst, but good things happen too.
The game is integrated through the exposition. There are striking details from fairy tale movies, like the 27-kilogram wedding dress Julia Roberts wore in the Snow White adaptation Mirror Mirror, so heavy that she covered her thigh when trying to walk in it. Also striking is Patricia Piccinini’s Enchanted Field installation, a dusty pink gallery hanging garden filled with friendly characters and mushroom rings.
I could have stayed in Piccinini’s room all day, but Cinderella called to me from the next gallery: a black-and-white silent film Cinderella that offers a decidedly more macabre take on fantasy. Released in 1922 by German entertainer Lotte Reiniger, it includes blood dripping from feet cut off to fit the glass slipper. In the same room, we see delicate paper cutouts by Hans Christian Andersen and a mischievous Y-foreheaded Pinocchio by Australian sculptor Ron Mueck, as well as Del Kathryn Barton’s brief but moving animation The Nightingale and the Rose, in which A delicate bird with huge feminine breasts and pinkish-red nipples impales itself for love. Oh.
These works support the duality of fairy tales; They are either “provocatively subversive or trivially traditional,” says gallery director Chris Saines. “They were originally told to terrify children from wandering into the woods in pre-industrial Europe, but they have since provided a series of big-budget films and artists and storytellers have told and disturbed them to intrigue and unnerve us.”
Like its subject, the exhibition is a dreamlike experience. Memories will flutter past you like moths, or you might emerge feeling broken like an old mirror. It may not be happily ever after, but you could leave transformed.
