An evening with NIki de Saint Phalle

Screening with a lecture by Alison Gingeras, curator of the exhibition The Woman Question 1550–2025.

The lecture will be held in English.

An evening with Niki de Saint Phalle 

 

Through an unhappy childhood and young adulthood that culminated in a mental health crisis and a period of institutionalisation in the early 1950s, Niki de Saint Phalle arrived at her artistic practice in a rapture, an overwhelming realisation that with art she could remake life. 

By the 1960s she gained international recognition for Tirs, her shooting paintings in which she fired live ammunition at plaster relief filled with pigment. Her consequent works extended this sense of exuberant energy into large-scale environments, most famously SHE – a Cathedral (1966), whose monumental body would echo decades later  in the sphinx-like figure of Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014), a discreet link between outsized, allegorical femininities that continue to reverberate through time. Her Tuscan Tarot Garden of 22 towering sculptures representing the Major Arcana was another project of mythic scale. 

Daddy (1973), made in close collaboration between Niki de Saint Phalle and director Peter Whitehead, from a screenplay by Saint Phalle, is the most direct confrontation with the origin wound of Saint Phalle’s biography: the sexual abuse she experienced from her father.

Structured as a surreal psychodrama, the film uses carnivalesque excess to expose and confront the figure of the father not only as an individual perpetrator but also as an archetype: the patriarchal figure whose authority governs social order, religion, sexuality, and art.

Refusing the conventions of victim testimony of the time and instead exposing the patriarchal structures that make gendered violence possible, Saint Phalle stages scenes of incest, masturbation, and ritualised desecration, including a defilement of a church altar and a burial of an enormous plaster phallus.

The film’s mixture of confession and grotesque theatricality are a key point in Saint Phalle’s practice, revealing how personal testimony can be reconfigured through the visual languages of myth and performance.

Where Daddy takes aim at patriarchal authority both personal and structural, A dream longer than the night (1977) turns toward an imaginary terrain where such authority is formed, that is myths and fairy tales, dreams and stories, symbols and archetypes.

The film follows a young girl, Camélia, as she moves through a fantastical world inhabited by monsters, queens, and magicians, and is governed through ominous rites. Structured as a series of tableaux, it depicts transformation and danger, mapping a young woman’s passage from childhood to adulthood as a symbolic journey through Western visual and narrative traditions.

Made during a particularly rich period of feminist filmmakers’ challenging traditional representations of female identity, desire and subjectivity, A dream longer than the night is well aligned with Marguerite Duras’ haunted modernism, Chantal Akerman’s structural radicalism or Barbara Hammer’s experimental eroticism. It premiered in the same year as Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s seminal Riddles of the Sphinx (1977). In this climate, A dream longer than the night draws on the fairytale as a mode of subversion, in parallel with Angela Carter’s ideas on how fairytales expose cultural fears, and how rewriting them becomes an act of rewriting the self. Motifs drawn from both the Bible and the Tarot appear as fragments of a moral universe Saint Phalle refuses to inherit unchanged. Archetypes of metamorphosis, peril, and initiation become thresholds through which Camélia grows, fractures, and finally reconstitutes herself. 

Presented together, Daddy and A dream longer than the night offer foreshadowing for more contemporary rereadings of myth and archetype – what Jess Zimmerman describes in Women and Other Monsters as the reclamation of figures once used to discipline women, reimagined instead as vessels of unruly knowledge and possibility. Saint Phalle’s sorceresses and spectral queens become prototypes of this counter-mythology: embodiments of female agency emerging from the ruins of the stories that once sought to contain it.

[Aleksandra Jeglińska]