Tate Connections | Touring Exhibitions

The Uncanny is based on a project originally presented by Mike Kelley more than a decade ago, which has been revised and updated for Tate Liverpool and the Museum of Modern Art (MUMOK) in Vienna in close collaboration with the artist. Valerie Smith, the curator of Sonsbeek 93, initiated the project by asking the artist for a site-specific installation. Mike responded by staging an ambitious exhibition with numerous loans, documentary photographs and a large collection of personal objects. Since this first presentation in 1993, the exhibition and catalogue have achieved an almost mythical status and we are pleased to be able to recreate and expand this important work.

Freud described the uncanny as 'a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it'. In The Uncanny, Kelley explores memory, recollection, horror and anxiety through the juxtaposition of a highly personal collection of objects - the Harems - with an investigation of the uncanny through realist figurative sculpture.

The central element of the exhibition consists of a substantial number of polychrome figurative sculptures, ranging from ancient Egypt and China to the present day which embody the feeling of the uncanny through their scale and use of colour, form and material. Kelley relates these to the idea of the 'double' - the disturbingly realistic representation of the human figure suspended between life and death. Artists represented include John de Andrea, Hans Bellmer, Judy Fox, Robert Gober, Duane Hanson, Damien Hirst, Edward Kienholz, Jeff Koons, Tony Matelli, Paul McCarthy, Ron Mueck, Tony Oursler, and many more. Non-art objects include a variety of historical and contemporary anatomical models, wax figures, animatronic puppets and stuffed animals. This section is complemented by a large collection of black and white documentary photographs depicting figurative sculptures from the Ancient world to the contemporary, including wax figures, Dada and Surrealist mannequins, film stills, newspaper clippings and cartoons whose imagery and subject matter evoke the sense of the 'uncanny'.

The spectacular section of sculptures is complemented by the Harems. These consist of sixteen groups of object types accumulated by the artist throughout his lifetime, from childhood to the present, ranging from marbles and squeeze toys to hundreds of bubble gum cards, postcards, record covers, magazines and found church banners. The work is on-going as Kelley continues to add items to various of the object groups. The Harems have been called 'a collection of collections' bringing together autobiographical elements with an investigation into the urge to collect and categorise as a means of understanding but also controlling the world.