Alice, Dolls, and Other Worlds

What is a doll?

An imaginary daughter? A miniature version of ourselves? A character we would like to become? A body waiting for someone to give it a story?

The extraordinary Russian illustrator Maxim Mitrofanov, wandered through a large doll exhibition in Moscow looking especially for Alice and her companions. Among countless creations, he photographed Alices, White Rabbits, Mad Hatters, and other creatures that seem to have stepped through the looking-glass and found new bodies.

Looking at these images, I began to wonder whether there might be a deep connection between Alice and dolls. Alice is constantly changing size. She grows, shrinks, becomes estranged from her own body, and asks, “Who am I?” A doll also plays with scale and identity. It is human without being human, someone and something at once. It can be a child, an adult, a fantastic creature, a double, a character, an alter ego.

As children, we care for dolls as if they were our daughters. But perhaps we also live through them. We dress them in clothes we would like to wear, give them houses, names, adventures, fears, and desires. We create little worlds for them to inhabit. Or perhaps we create those worlds because we would like to enter them ourselves.

A dollhouse is a miniature world before which we are giants. Yet through imagination, we can become small enough to cross its threshold. Perhaps this is one of the mysteries of the doll: it does not merely represent someone. It opens a world. A place where we can become someone else, experiment with other bodies and other lives, and give what does not fit into the ordinary world another scale in which to exist. Alice knows very well how to get there.

And you? When you look at a doll, do you see someone to care for, someone you would like to be, or a magical world you would like to inhabit, at least in imagination? 🗝️🍄

 

 

Alice in Moscow: A Wonderland of Dolls

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@iskusstvokukly 

My friend Yvonne just sent me a wonderful collection of photographs from Moscow, taken by Maxim Mitrofanov, an extraordinary Russian illustrator who has created his own visions of Alice in Wonderland for several special editions. But this time, Alice had stepped out of the pages of books and into another world altogether: the art of dolls.

Maxim visited the 17th Moscow International Exhibition “The Art of Dolls”, held from October 1–3, 2026, at Gostiny Dvor, just beside Red Square. It is an enormous annual event, bringing together more than 1,000 participants from across Russia in a space of 14,000 square meters. Among this astonishing population of dolls, Maxim went looking especially for Carrollian creatures.

And, of course, he found them.

 

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Alices, White Rabbits, Hatters and other inhabitants of Wonderland appeared again and again, each transformed through the imagination and craftsmanship of a different artist. Maxim told me that Alice remains enormously popular among Russian doll makers, with artists continually inventing their own interpretations of her.

What fascinates me is precisely this endless capacity for reinvention. Alice herself has become such a powerful image of the feminine: curious, questioning, changing size, crossing boundaries and entering impossible worlds. The White Rabbit keeps opening doors, the Hatter keeps unsettling ordinary time, and Alice continues to follow them.

Looking at Maxim’s photographs, my immediate reaction as an artist was to imagine the dolls coming alive. I wanted to see miniature theatrical environments growing around them, little rooms, forests, tea tables, doors and impossible gardens. I even told Maxim that I could imagine these settings inspiring collectors to construct their own miniature Wonderlands at home.

Maxim explained, however, that this is very much a collectors’ exhibition and marketplace. The crowds were enormous even on a Thursday, and some dolls had already been sold or reserved before he could photograph them. Prices for the works he saw ranged roughly from 5,000 to 50,000 rubles, or about US$60 to US$600, although he suspected that some were considerably more expensive.

There is no exhibition catalogue, perhaps unsurprisingly given the extraordinary number of participating artists. Maxim has promised to send me any additional websites or videos he discovers, and he has also generously given me permission to share his photographs here.

Perhaps that is what delights me most about these photographs. Lewis Carroll’s Alice has long since escaped from her original book. She travels between countries, languages and artistic media, becoming illustration, cinema, sculpture, doll, dream and memory. Every artist sends her through the looking-glass once again, and every time she emerges slightly different.

Thank you, dear Maxim, for wandering through this enormous celebration of dolls with your camera and looking especially for Alice and her companions. Through your photographs, a little door has opened between Moscow and all of us who continue, in our own ways, to build new Wonderlands. ✨🐇🍄

 

 

Last year.... 

 

Looking back at the 2025 edition of the Moscow International Exhibition “The Art of the Doll”, held at Gostiny Dvor, gives an idea of the extraordinary scale and variety of this annual event.

More than 1,000 artists from 80 Russian cities and nine countries took part, presenting everything from antique and museum dolls to contemporary art dolls, literary and fairy-tale characters, miniatures, dollhouses, BJD and experimental works involving new technologies and AI.

The exhibition occupied around 10,000 square metres, bringing together individual artists, collectors, galleries and museums. Many of the works were unique pieces, and some appeared as complete narrative scenes and miniature worlds rather than isolated dolls.

These images from last year offer another glimpse into that wonderfully strange universe, where dolls become sculpture, storytelling, theatre and little doors into imaginary worlds.

These are just a few of the dozens of fascinating images Maxim sent me.