If you’re planning on taking a child to Brisbane’s new blockbuster Fairy Tales exhibition, I recommend you take a look for yourself first. How’s your kid doing with dripping blood, gnarled toenails and inflatable sex dolls?
Related: Emily Kam Kngwarray: stunning retrospective brings perspective – and agency – to an Australian great
Fairy Tales – now on display at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (Goma) – features more than 100 works of art, including sculpture, installations, painting, photography, animation, video art and film props and costumes. Weird and wonderful as all cautionary tales should be, it is thought-provoking and aimed primarily at adults – although we should never underestimate children’s appreciation for fear and wonder.
There’s plenty of both in Fairy Tales, a show that traces the artistic history of European fables and folklore – both their kaleidoscopic fantasies and their gruesome horrors. Upon entering the exhibition, the white walls of the gallery begin to slide away as tree branches forcefully force their way through. A splintered, bulging wooden installation by Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira forces visitors to dodge protruding branches as they inhale the sweet scent of freshly cut Brazilian plywood and locally sourced driftwood.
“The idea of the forests is that they are uncontrollable environments, and they push you to go on adventures,” 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, she says, saw the forest as a metaphor for “evil intentions” lurking in the streets and waiting for vulnerable young ladies.
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 wearing Grandma’s hat. It’s the moment before he devours her. On the right is American artist Kiki Smith’s 2002 feminist retelling of the same story, Born, a lithograph print showing the little girl and the grandmother emerging unharmed from the wolf’s belly.
A few steps further, two red concave mirrors by Anish Kapoor – a 2018 work titled Red and Black Mist Magenta – stagger visitors.
“Whoa, that’s too much,” said a woman who hurried away. In the reflection, your face may jump out at you – or suddenly you’re upside down or small, with other visitors looming behind you. If you don’t want to fall, you have to stand very still. “Mirrors in fairy tales sometimes tell you that you’re not worthy,” says Slack-Smith. She’s not wrong.
One of the highlights of the exhibition is the Witch House (Seance of the Umbilical Coven) by the American artist Trulee Hall. It’s a large hut covered in slimy looking black tree roots – or worms perhaps. Visitors enter one by one. “The artist says it’s a clubhouse for witches,” says Slack-Smith.
Inside, it is lit with small flickering candles and decorated with black dream catchers, upside-down baskets, black fur, more worms and, perversely, inflatable black sex dolls. A video shows unspeakable things coming out of an orifice; there is a séance in progress.
It’s perhaps the most disturbing part of an exhibition that’s already brimming with nightmare fuel: images of tormented lost children, long human hair with a mind of its own, poisonous mushrooms or post-coital trolls enjoying a tender, sleepy cuddle.
Among the more enjoyable parts of Fairy Tales are scenes from a child’s bedroom fantasy. The enormous Jim Henson dolls from Spike Jonze’s film 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.”
Related: NGV Triennial 2023 Review: Plenty of showstoppers – and monstrosity – in another blockbuster show
The most playful piece is a papercut animation entitled You Were in My Dream. Created by Australian artists Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine, it invites visitors to place their face in an oval hole and become immersed in a series of short adventures. You’re a kid chasing an attractive rabbit through the woods, only to turn into a panting dog, and then into a wolf, and… oh dear. You can expect the worst, but good things happen too.
Game is embedded in the exhibition. There are naughty details from fairytale films – like the 27kg wedding dress Julia Roberts wore in the Snow White adaptation Mirror Mirror, so heavy she clung to her thigh when she tried to walk in it. Also striking is Patricia Piccinini’s installation Enchanted Field, a hanging garden in a powder-pink gallery full of soft characters and mushroom rings.
I could have stayed in Piccinini’s room all day, but Cinderella beckoned from the next gallery – a silent black and white film Cinderella that offers a decidedly macabre take on fantasy. Released in 1922 by German animator Lotte Reiniger, it comes complete with blood dripping from feet slaughtered to fit the glass slipper. In the same room we see Hans Christian Andersen’s delicate papercuts and a mischievous Pinocchio in his Y-fronts by Australian sculptor Ron Mueck, as well as Del Kathryn Barton’s short but heartbreaking animation, The Nightingale and the Rose, in which a delicate bird with huge feminine breasts and pinkish red nipples impaling herself for love. Ouch.
These works contain the duality of fairy tales; they are “provocatively subversive or trivially traditional,” says gallery director Chris Saines. “They were originally told to scare children into wandering into the woods in pre-industrial Europe, but they have since spawned a string of big-budget films and been narrated and disrupted by artists and storytellers to intrigue us and too nervous.”
Just like the subject, the exhibition is a dream-like experience. Memories will flutter past you like moths, or you may come out cracked like an old mirror. You may not be happy for much longer, but you could leave transformed.