My Silence Is Made of Explosions - A Group Exhibition of Contemporary Women Surrealist Photographers

Elena Dorfman, Jamie 1, 2000. Archival pigment print mounted on aluminum, 30 x 30 in. Edition of 12. Courtesy of the artist.  

CLARE GEMIMA March 2026

My Silence Is Made of Explosions

A Group Exhibition of Contemporary Women Surrealist Photographers

March 19 – May 31, 2026

VISU Contemporary

2160 Park Ave, Suite 100

Miami Beach, FL 33139.

More than a century after André Breton published the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924, the movement’s fascination with dream logic, psychological ambiguity, and destabilized meaning continues to exert a strong pull on contemporary artists. My Silence Is Made of Explosions, a group exhibition at VISU Contemporary in Miami Beach, brings together twenty-eight works that demonstrate how Surrealism persists less as a historical style than as an adaptable framework for examining the tensions of contemporary life.

Featuring works by Aïda Muluneh, Jen DeNike, Elena Dorfman, Patricia Voulgaris, Pixy Liao, Tania Franco Klein, Dora Maar, and Zanele Muholi—along with two collaborative works by DeNike and Barbara von Portatius—the exhibition presents photography as a medium capable of staging and destabilizing reality at once. What connects these artists is not a uniform aesthetic but a shared interest in constructing images that hover between the visible world and interior psychological states. The photographs resist narrative clarity, often suspending their subjects in moments that feel intimate yet disorienting and distant.

Photography has traditionally carried the authority of evidence, yet throughout the exhibition the medium repeatedly undermines its own claim to truth. Scenes appear carefully arranged, gestures symbolic, and environments slightly estranged from everyday logic. Rather than functioning as documents, the works operate more like psychological propositions—images that invite viewers to consider the emotional and symbolic structures shaping contemporary experience.

Patricia Voulgaris, Magic Hands, 2023. 20 x 30 in. Edition of 10. Courtesy of the artist.

Elena Dorfman’s Jamie 1, 2000, exemplifies this tension between documentation and performance. The photograph’s composed portraiture resists easy interpretation, creating a subtle distance between subject and viewer. Dorfman has long been interested in photographing intimate or unconventional identities, and here her image functions less as reportage than as a carefully staged encounter that heightens the viewer’s awareness of observation itself.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Surrealism’s psychological language expands into overtly political territory. Zanele Muholi’s photographic practice—rooted in the documentation of Black queer life—carries an unmistakable sense of presence and self-determination. Muholi’s images challenge the historical marginalization of queer identity and Black subjectivity within visual culture, transforming portraiture into a site of resistance.

Jen DeNike, Mirror Levitation, Vision 1, 2022. Archival print on watercolor paper in artist frame, 62 x 42 in. (framed). Unique with 1 AP. Courtesy of the artist and Central Fine. 

Aïda Muluneh’s photographs operate through a different strategy, relying on striking color and symbolic composition to construct images that evoke ritual, myth, and collective memory. Carefully choreographed bodies and graphic visual structures transform the photograph into a stage where cultural narratives unfold through gesture and form.

The exhibition’s title, My Silence Is Made of Explosions, gestures toward this underlying pressure. Silence here is not passive but charged, suggesting the accumulation of memory, emotion, and suppressed expression beneath the surface of the image. Many of the works operate within this moment of containment—scenes poised just before release, where psychological intensity gathers without fully resolving.

Dora Maar (1907–1997), Portrait of Nusch Eluard (with foliage), ca. 1935. Vintage gelatin silver print, 12.6 x 18 cm. Collection of David Raymond, North Carolina.

Historically, women were frequently positioned as muses within Surrealist imagery while remaining peripheral to the movement’s intellectual authority. By foregrounding contemporary women photographers—alongside Dora Maar, one of Surrealism’s most complex historical figures—the exhibition subtly reframes that legacy. Rather than functioning as a corrective gesture, the artists presented here demonstrate how Surrealism continues to evolve through practices that engage questions of identity, intimacy, and power.

If Surrealist works have always lingered like fragments of dreams, the photographs in My Silence Is Made of Explosions succeed precisely because they refuse resolution. In this sense, the exhibition suggests that Surrealism’s most enduring contribution may not be its historical moment, but its ongoing capacity to reveal the unstable terrain beneath the surface of everyday reality.

Pixy Liao, Men As Bags, 2016. Video, 3:00 minutes. Edition of 5. Courtesy of the artist and Alisan Fine Arts, New York.