At first glance, Die Doppelgängerin is an imposing object: a monumental bronze sculpture depicting twin pairs of oversized scissors. Yet its meaning is deliberately less certain. Unsettling and ambiguous, the installation invites interpretation rather than offering a single answer.
The title provides the first clue. Doppelgängerin draws on the German word for a look-alike, der Doppelgänger, and the related idea of an “other self” or “shadow”. The figure of the doppelgänger entered the collective consciousness through Romantic literature, associated with the eighteenth-century German writer Jean Paul, although similar ideas existed in Scandinavian and Irish cultures. In the humanities, the concept has often provided a way of thinking about the divided nature of identity, hidden aspects of personality and complex ideas of self.
VALIE EXPORT transforms that traditionally male form into a female one by adding the suffix “-in”, creating both a new word and a different understanding of the figure.
The doubled scissors carry their own layers of meaning. They can be understood as the tools of a seamstress, connecting them to needlework and the historical stereotype of sewing as women’s work. At the same time, scissors are used in film editing, an especially relevant association in the work of an artist whose practice has encompassed film, video, performance and installation.
They can also suggest cutting, trimming and physical alteration, bringing the body into the interpretation. Enlarged far beyond their ordinary scale, the scissors acquire a symbolic force that can point in two directions at once. They can represent control over women’s bodies, but also agency when the tool is placed in the hands of the person using it. Their duplication further complicates the image, making the sculpture less a statement than a field of possibilities.
That ambiguity becomes particularly significant in downtown Warsaw. Here, the monumental scissors are connected in the source material both to the historical horrors associated with the place and to the experiences of women who were pushed to the margins of social life. Yet they can also be read as instruments of separation, cutting ties with the past and marking the possibility of new beginnings.
This tension reflects the wider practice of VALIE EXPORT, the Austrian artist whose work from the 1960s onwards challenged established ideas about gender, sexuality, the body and artistic authority. A pioneer of video, installation and performance art, she repeatedly placed the female body at the centre of her work, treating it as an active medium rather than simply an object of representation.
Her approach was often deliberately confrontational. Through performances, films, photographs, installations and writing, she questioned established structures of power and conventional representations of women. Her adoption of the name VALIE EXPORT itself rejected convention, taking the name from a popular Austrian cigarette brand rather than following traditional expectations surrounding an artist's identity.
In Die Doppelgängerin, that questioning takes another form. There is no single explanation attached to the scissors. They can suggest domestic labour, filmmaking, bodily alteration, violence, independence or rupture. Their enormous scale ensures that an ordinary object can no longer remain ordinary.
Perhaps that is the significance of placing them in Warsaw. The scissors do not determine what should be remembered or what the future should look like. Instead, they leave the act of interpretation with those who encounter them. What they ultimately cut, preserve or transform remains open, depending on what comes next.
Visitor Information
Location: Downtown Warsaw
Work: Die Doppelgängerin
Artist: VALIE EXPORT (1940–2026)
Medium: Bronze sculpture
