How artists have used the ‘uncanny’ as a feminist strategy

When Sigmund Freud wrote his essay “The Uncanny” a century ago, he brought the strange psychological phenomenon into the mainstream. The word is often used to describe the uneasiness one feels when encountering something familiar yet foreign—like a doll that looks a little too human or a painting that feels hauntingly real.

But a new exhibition at Washington, DC's National Museum of Women in the Arts asks visitors to consider another meaning. The original German title of Freud’s essay was “Das Unheimliche”, which translates to “the unhomely” or the feeling of not being at home. What happens when a place that should feel welcoming suddenly does not? When a safe space becomes an unsafe one. Women know this experience well.

“It can mean something very specific—like the domestic space where a woman might feel that home is a burden to them,” the exhibition’s curator, Orin Zahra, tells The Art Newspaper. “Or it could mean the national space, where the homeland becomes something unsafe.”

Though planned well in advance of the 2024 election, Uncanny (until 10 August) may strike a particular chord for women in the US. The reelection of Donald Trump, whose first presidential term undermined access to birth control and led to an end of federal protections of abortion rights, has many fearful of what the country will look like for women going forward.

“Women artists want to explore feelings of anxiety, of anguish and traumas in their lives, and the way they often do it is through uncanny imagery,” Zahra says. “Imagery that intentionally makes us feel a little anxious, a little uncomfortable and psychologically tense.”

Uncanny features nearly 70 works from modern and contemporary female artists—from the Surrealist sculptures of Leonora Carrington to the staged photography of Laurie Simmons. While museums have long explored the use of the uncanny in art, Zahra says that it is likely the first exhibition of this scale to examine the concept through a feminist lens. Three primary themes are threaded throughout: surreal imaginings, unsafe spaces and the “uncanny valley”.

Surrealist art is rich with uncanny imagery, with its dreamlike settings and illogical scenes. Historically, male Surrealists have portrayed women in rather uncanny ways, presenting them as fetishised or infantilised objects rather than as fully dimensional humans. The Surrealist pieces in this exhibition work against these tropes. “Women are using the uncanny to assert their creative agency and their agency in general,” Zahra says. “It’s about reclamation of the way they have been treated and viewed through the male lens, but using it to express their own lived experiences.”

Louise Bourgeois’s 1989 sculpture Untitled appears to show a baby’s foot protruding from a heavy marble ball. The marble is smooth and alluring; the child’s foot, tender and innocent—yet it is disconnected from any human body. Intrigue turns to horror: Was it dismembered? Is the marble crushing the baby?

“Her work speaks to the trauma of childbirth,” Zahra says. “She went through postpartum depression. There were a lot of ambivalent feelings about having children and being a mother.”

The works are not meant to make visitors feel comfortable; they urge viewers to ask questions and become informed. That is the hope of the contemporary artist Sheida Soleimani, who uses art to share stories of people harmed by their governments. One of her works in the show, Delara II, portrays Delara Darabi, a young Iranian woman who was imprisoned and executed in 2009.

“She was convicted primarily of murdering someone, but she actually did not commit the crime,” Soleimani says. “Many people who are incarcerated in Iran, women especially, are pressured into saying that they committed crimes that they did not commit through torture.”

Delara II, a staged photograph, shows a pixelated image of Darabi printed onto sculptural effigies reminiscent of Bobo dolls—a reference to the psychologist Albert Bandura’s social-learning experiment in the 1960s, in which children who watched adults punch inflatable, round-bottomed dolls mirrored similar behaviour.

“I was thinking about how Iranian society endorses aggression on women and how this is something that’s ingrained into culture from a very young age,” Soleimani says. “The blame-shifting, scapegoating—all of these things are challenges that women face.”

Many of the works on view draw on the “uncanny valley”, a phrase that describes the strangeness evoked by figures that appear human but have unnatural qualities. The video series Conversations with Bina48 follows the artist Stephanie Dinkins’s interactions with a humanoid robot modeled after a Black woman. Bina48, a human-like head and shoulders mounted on a pedestal, is based on Bina Aspen Rothblatt, the wife of Martine Rothblatt, who launched the Terasem Movement—a foundation that promotes the extension of human life through biotechnology.

In the videos, Dinkins finds herself asking the robot about its culture, race and gender. “It’s questioning who’s making this—and who is it truly representing?” Dinkins says. “And what happens if somebody else is telling your story?”

The clips are eerie to watch. The robot has advanced language skills, raising difficult questions about robots’ independence and what rights, if any, they should have. But, again, that discomfort is the point.

“Our world is going to throw more and more discomfort at us through technologies,” Dinkins says. “We tend to get entrenched in the things that we believe and dismiss things that seem outside of the realm of what we know. But how do you do that when so many things are coming at you so quickly that you need to be able to contend with? Walk with your discomfort. Don’t get stuck on the surface.”

• Uncanny, until 10 August, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC