The Ritual (with Doll)

What exactly is going on in this picture? Are we looking at a group of girls playing with a doll or are we witnessing some sinister event? The work of Marlene Dumas is often about the tension between looking and being looked at and, in fact, about the problem of interpretation. She makes frequent use of existing depictions, from pornographic pictures and police photographs to art reproductions, which she collects for her own personal archive of visual material. This material reflects the social codes that determine how we look at things: Dumas enjoys undermining these codes and revealing their inconsistencies. Her uneasiness with the ideal of reducing the artwork to its essence can be explained from this point of view. To her, there is no single essence, no single truth.