Down the Rabbit Hole2008
12 framed phtographs, d-prints
15 x 15 cm
Down the Rabbit Hole is a reproduction of twelve illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) made by John Tenniel (1866). Assembled by the artist, Alice’s face is masked in all of the illustrations. Alice Liddell – the brunette real Alice – appears somewhere in the frame. In Tenniel’s illustrations, Alice is transformed into a blonde girl. In literary, feminist and post-structuralist theory, Alice has been taken as an intriguing example of a subject, her identity is a not that of a minority or being deterritorialized, but rather, it is in and of itself a continual process of deterritorialization. Following the artist ‘down the rabbit hole’, we stop reading, and start seeing Alice: between the real, Carroll’s rumored fantasy-child-inamorata, and the representation and transformation she undergoes in Tenniel’s depictions. Down the Rabbit Hole restores the fiction back into our reality – through a binding reference, a lock of dark hair.
Sarah Rifky
April 2009
© 2007-2011 Shirin Sabahi
