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. 

 

 

 

 

 

An Alice that travels across technologies and through time.

 

 watch the video:

@helena.helenbar has just released a new video that brings together two of her great passions: her meticulous interest in technical processes and the history of printing, and her long-standing relationship with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

A design professor and scholar of printing processes, Helenbar delves into the material world of the early editions of Alice, exploring how the images in Lewis Carroll’s books were produced and printed. At the same time, she revisits her own Alice illustrations, created in Photoshop more than twenty years ago, and now uses artificial intelligence to bring them to life, including her unforgettable Caterpillar.

Her story with Alice, however, began much earlier. Her first drawings appeared in 1992. In 2003, after sewing a blue dress for a party, Helenbar began photographing herself as Alice and constructing, image by image, her own Wonderland. Each composition emerged from dozens of photographs, objects, drawings, and references, through a meticulous process of photomontage in Photoshop.

These digital Alices received considerable attention in the Brazilian and international press and were also featured in Knight Letter, the publication of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America.

There is something particularly fascinating, then, about this new video. Helenbar brings different moments in the history of image-making into dialogue: the graphic processes that gave form to the earliest printed Alices, the Photoshop techniques with which she created her own Alices in the early 2000s, and now artificial intelligence, which allows them to move.

In an interview I conducted with her in 2009, Helenbar described her digital process as a “constant embroidering and un-embroidering.” More than twenty years later, she continues to embroider and un-embroider Alice through the technologies of her time.

Helenbar’s latest journey into Wonderland is truly worth discovering.

 LEIA MAIS 

SITE 

Go ask Alice….

Digital collage by Robin Isely 

At the threshold between the familiar and the unknown, Alice follows the White Rabbit into a world where the forest becomes a doorway to the unconscious. Each step invites her to leave certainty behind, cross an inner threshold, and enter the mysterious territory of imagination, dreams, and transformation.

 

Alice, Cut and Reimagined: The Collage Worlds of Sawako

 

 

 

 

Vídeo 1 

Vídeo 2

 

 

@sawako6272

 

In two videos inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Sawako develops a visual language born from the encounter between the materiality of handmade collage and the possibilities of movement opened up by generative artificial intelligence. Rather than erasing the traces of cutting, layering, and handcrafted construction, technology seems to set them in motion. The images retain something tactile, fragile, and deliberately imperfect, while beginning to inhabit a strange temporality somewhere between animation, dream, and metamorphosis.

This way of working is directly connected to what the artist herself says about her creative process. Sawako describes making hand-cut collages, like a diary, and sometimes transforming this work into videos that combine collage and generative AI. When I asked her to say a few words about her relationship with Alice and the videos, she also explained that she finds it difficult to verbalize her creative process precisely because it is essentially intuitive: she works without a predetermined intention, allowing her hands to move freely and guide the process.

Perhaps this is precisely where one of the most compelling qualities of her Alices can be found. They do not seem to begin with an interpretation that is subsequently translated into images. Instead, they emerge through the act of making itself. First come the hands, the cut-outs, the associations, and unexpected encounters; then, through AI, these images begin to move, transform, and establish new relationships. Technology does not replace the handmade gesture, but extends its associative logic.

Alice within

Hope Doe (@flyapples), an American artist based in Japan, creates harmonious worlds where humans and nature merge. Blending Western influences with traditional Japanese techniques such as sumi ink, her symbiotic portraits explore emotion, connection, and humanity’s place within nature.

source:  @pmamtraveller

"The 'Lewis Carroll' show is now open at @havengallery ! So now I can finally show the finished painting!I adore Lewis Carroll's Wonderland books and they are a huge inspiration in my work. Despite that, an idea for this show took some time. I wanted to do so much too. However, I am glad I went forward to this idea."Hope Doe

 

ALICEDELIC BOSCH Receives Official Selection at the AI Master Award (AIMA)

 

I'm happy to share that ALICEDELIC BOSCH has been selected as an Official Selection of the AI Master Award (AIMA).

After Garden of Alicinations received recognition in its film version, it is especially rewarding to see this image recognized as an independent work.

ALICEDELIC BOSCH brings together the classic Alices illustrated by John Tenniel and Gertrude Thomson with the extraordinary world of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. Created with artificial intelligence as part of my ongoing artistic research, the work explores the intersection of literature, art history, symbolism, and contemporary image-making.

It is very meaningful to see this research acknowledged across different artistic languages: first as a film, and now as a single image.

My thanks to the AIMA jury for this selection and to everyone who continues to follow and support my work. I look forward to sharing the next projects soon.