They are not children. They are not alive. And yet Gisèle Vienne's dolls — photographed in tight, unflinching close-up across a series spanning five years — possess a gaze so loaded with affect that the viewer's first instinct is to look away. The pallor. The glazed eyes. The slight bruising around the cheekbones. These are faces built to unsettle, and they do their work with terrifying efficiency.

40 Portraits (2003–2008) collects the silent faces of dolls that Vienne — a French-Austrian choreographer, visual artist, and puppeteer — has created over the course of her theatrical practice. Each figure is handmade, sculpted with painstaking anatomical specificity, then dressed, wigged, and positioned with the care of a forensic reconstruction. They are composites: part adolescent, part archetype, part accusation.

As Elsa Dorlin writes: "The color of anguish. Pallor, glazed eyes staring blankly, faces motionless, sometimes with bloodstains or tears, come to life in a teenage attitude, voices muffled — all clues hinting at a culture of violence, repressed yet haunting our myths of innocence and purity bathed in white." This is the register Vienne operates in: a clinical pallor that functions less as aesthetic choice than as diagnostic tool. The white is not innocence. It is evidence.

What makes the series disquieting is the suspension it stages. These dolls hover between childhood and adulthood, the living and the inanimate. They wear hoodies, t-shirts with gothic lettering, raincoats — the wardrobe of suburban adolescence rendered with anthropological precision. One figure has blonde hair swept across vacant, glassy eyes; another hunches beneath a black hood, face entirely hidden. A third stares directly at the camera with dark, kohled eyes and a bruised mouth — part crime-scene photograph, part Renaissance Pietà.

Vienne's background in theatre is essential. These dolls are performers between acts — caught in suspended animation. Their stillness is charged. Their silence is loud. The photographic format strips away the theatrical apparatus and isolates the doll in a confrontation that is entirely between it and the viewer.

The installation places the viewer in "a complicit condition: voyeurism becomes here a trap for a direct confrontation with the scabrous object of our imagination that invites us to come to terms with the forms of domination that cradle us." You came to see; now see what that means.

Vienne's dolls are sad, androgynous beings that slide between gender, between age, between the human and the simulacral. Some become "simulacra of death." Their beauty is the kind that curdles — precise enough to trigger empathy, distorted enough to deny it. In the broader context of Vienne's work with Dennis Cooper, these portraits function as an index of a theatre that stages what we prefer not to name: the aestheticization of vulnerability, the erotics of control, the culture of violence that moves through innocence like water through cloth. The dolls don't blink. They just wait for you to recognize yourself in the looking.