In the current exhibition Heroines at the world’s first Women’s Museum in Bonn, not only do outstanding historical female figures meet, but also contemporary women who continue to rethink the present. Here, literature meets visual art, utopia encounters surrealism – and Margaret Atwood meets Max Ernst.

Utopia Meets Surrealism

In a nod to the Picture Book of Kindness, Love, and Humanity, pregnant Barbie dolls, Atwoodian visions from the film adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, and Max Ernst’s subversive reflections on the Victorian era in her object-collages are combined. Paradoxically, Une Semaine de Bonté (1934) becomes the starting point for feminist reflection, a political statement, and an artistic homage – a multilayered engagement with power, control, body politics, and the question of what defines our humanity at its core.

Literary Heroism

Margaret Atwood is a heroine of our time. Not only because she uncompromisingly exposes patriarchal and political power structures, but also because she gives voice to critical reflections on aspects of society that are all too often ignored. Her speculative fiction, as she calls it herself, is not some distant utopia, but a meticulous extrapolation of the present. In works such as The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)  and The Testaments (2019), she envisions chillingly realistic future scenarios of totalitarian control, where female bodies are turned into political resources.

The Fracturing of Reality

In contrast to traditional book illustrations, these object-collages do not simply depict narratives – they transform them into an independent artistic language. The combination of digital collages and pregnant Barbie dolls with pop-open plastic bellies – a construction even housing plastic twins – merges art and commerce, and fuses Atwood’s dystopian universe with Max Ernst’s surrealist vocabulary in an uncanny way. The resulting scenes oscillate between myth and madness, where bodies, objects, mechanical worlds, and symbols blend into one another. Here, the disintegration hinted at in Atwood’s writing becomes visible: the collapse of reality, the fusion of human and system, the silencing of the individual within the machinery of social power.

What Does Post-Heroic Resistance Look Like?

These object-collages are more than visual reflections – they are an active dialogue. They invite us to see Atwood’s literary work through a new lens: through surreal imagery and an artistic language that digs beneath the surface. In this dynamic tension between text and image, pop culture and art history, new visual narratives emerge – ones that explore what resistance might look like when heroism doesn’t end in flames, but instead survives quietly, adaptively, persistently.

The exhibition Heroines at the Women’s Museum Bonn is more than a tribute to great female role models – it is an artistic call for vigilance. This series of works opens a space where literature, art, and the present enter into dialogue – unsettling, poetic, disturbing, and deeply moving.