Alice Anderson's Four-Exhibition Spring: Reimagining Fairy Tales Across French Museums

Alice Anderson, a French-British artist and filmmaker, presents four concurrent exhibitions this spring across the French Riviera, reinterpreting fairy tales through film, objects, and performance. The series, titled MIROIR, MIROIR, opens at the Musée Chagall in Nice and the Musée Picasso in Vallauris (March 29–June 6), includes a residency at Villa Arson (March–June), and concludes at the Frac Paca in Marseille (May 16–August 23). Additionally, her film The Doll's Day (2008) is shown at Espace Croisé in Roubaix. Anderson's work explores the duality of fairy tales—superficial yet profound, normative yet subversive—drawing on the Kawaii style's influence from artists like Murakami and the Kaikai Kiki collective. She emphasizes the role of toys and play, seductive yet unsettling imagery, and a narrative structure that is circular and labyrinthine rather than linear. Her installation Emmurée at Musée Chagall features a hundred meters of hair referencing Rapunzel, symbolizing the mother-child bond. Anderson directs actors to perform like automatons, delivering lines without breathing to mitigate the violence of childhood stories. She created a wax double of herself with Madame Tussauds sculptor Livia Turco, which she later placed in a coffin at the Musée Picasso chapel as an act of liberation. She identifies with Lewis Carroll's Alice and Peter Pan, not as reenactments but as parallel journeys through her own memories. The exhibitions are curated with Maud Jacquin.