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This shift toward a “girlified” cultural landscape acts as the starting point for this year’s Video Club theme: Imagining Girlhood. Video Club is a screening series that highlights the Stedelijk’s renowned collection of time-based media. In this recurring screening program, video art interacts with other works from the museum’s collection. Each Video Club revolves around a different theme, presenting videos that span diverse eras, regions, and artistic movements.
Figure 1. Instagram reel by user thefashionaries posted on October 1, 2023.
Figure 2. Meme by user sendhelp posted on December 29, 2023.
In this research log, I delve into three emblematic works from the screening in 2024: Ansuya Blom’s Amazing Grace (1989), Martine Neddam’s Visions of Mouchette (Victory Show by Victoria) (2021), and Pipilotti Rist’s I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1994). Blom’s Amazing Grace invites us into the realm of a girl’s bedroom, a sanctuary and stage for her dreams and dilemmas. Then there’s Neddam’s Mouchette, a digital diary of a thirteen-year-old girl composed of language and code. Lastly, Rist’s I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much emphasizes the performativity of girlhood, flipping the script on gendered expectations with a wink. Together, these works form a complex map of girlhood, where the personal is not just political—it’s paradoxical, pixelated, and playful.
Figure 3. Ansuya Bolm, Amazing Grace, 1989, 16 mm color film, 14 min.
Girlhood and Its Spaces
Ansuya Blom’s Amazing Grace offers a compelling exploration of girlhood through a narration about a young girl whom we observe as she plays with her toys and asks large existential questions (Fig. 3). The video’s opening line, “The bed is an untouched island, we all live in it, uninvited,” immediately establishes the bed as a central metaphor for experiences of female adolescence. Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber already implicated the bedroom as a symbolic space for expressions of girlhood in their piece Girls and Subcultures from 1976.[1]
The authors observed that while boys had the freedom to express their identities in the public sphere, girls were often confined to the privacy of their homes. Consequently, the bedroom evolved into a sanctuary for girls to indulge in their interests.
Blom’s work subtly engages with the tension between interior and exterior spaces, both literally and metaphorically. The protagonist is consistently viewed from outside when she’s inside the house, underscoring the often-hidden nature of girls’ inner lives. The video’s narration also extends the concept of interiority to the girl’s body itself: “She grew up an oil barrel, slowly filled with foreign fluids.” Blom’s words situate the girl’s corpus as a site to be inhabited, pointing to the discomfort and alienation accompanying adolescence, particularly when navigating societal pressures and gender expectations.
As a former student of psychoanalytic studies, Blom is interested in the layered experiences and dichotomies that shape the self. Stuart Morgan suggests we can think about the dolls in Amazing Grace as transitional objects,[2] a psychoanalytic term that D.W. Winnicott explains in the following way: “the transitional object is not an internal object—it is a possession. Yet it is not an external object either.”[3] It is interesting to extend the concept of transitional objects to the state of girlhood itself. Blom’s protagonist ends up collecting all her toys on top of her bed and burning them. By leaving the dolls behind, she also leaves her girlhood behind. The liminality of girlhood is painted beautifully in Blom’s work. Sometimes it functions as a construct that is embodied, at other times as a construct that feels foreign to those not identifying with what it traditionally entails. Some can thus, like Blom’s character, choose to leave it behind.
Figure 4. Martine Neddam, Mouchette.org: Version 1.0, 1996, interactive website. Collective purchase of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and MOTI. The purchase on the part of the Stedelijk Museum is generously supported by the Tijl Aankoop Fonds and a private donor, 2016.
Girl Online
Mouchette.org is an interactive website created in 1996 by Martine Neddam that functions as a virtual diary of Mouchette, a fictional thirteen-year-old girl living in Amsterdam. Visions of Mouchette (Victory Show by Victoria) (2021) is part of a larger archive that showcases various users interacting with Mouchette.org. In this particular video, a YouTuber named Victoria scrolls through the site, narrating her experience. Neddam conceived Mouchette in the early days of the internet, when anonymity was still the norm. The web before cookies, tracking IDs, and master platforms allowed for a level of online frivolity that is hard to imagine today. One’s real-life identity could be entirely disconnected from one’s digital persona, enabling users to temporarily escape offline realities. Many teenagers were, therefore, drawn to the online realm where they could experiment with their identities more freely than in the outside world.
Mouchette embodies one such girl, using the internet to express herself emotionally and creatively. Her corpus is composed of language, code, image, and sound. The website’s pink hues strike a familiar chord (Fig. 4), but as one delves deeper into Mouchette’s various subsites, the tones darken considerably. An image of her tongue appears, inviting viewers to imagine its taste (Fig. 5). Elsewhere, a portrait of her father composed of raw meat can be found. The imagery is rife with sexual undertones and blurs into motifs of death and trauma—subjects often deemed too taboo for discussion by young girls. But Neddam is interested in precisely those dark moments associated with the thirteen-year-old girl’s experiences.
The artist draws inspiration from literature, exploring how works like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) have narrated sexuality in relation to girls. Scrolling through Mouchette, one can find plenty of disturbing content that plays with hypersexual imagery. But while it may seem that Mouchette is a victim of a violent patriarchal gaze, it must be acknowledged that she is the one holding the reins. Mouchette identifies herself as a “wattlechick,”[4] positioning herself as the manipulator of her own image. This subversive approach allows a young girl to implicate herself in debates relating to sexuality, trauma, and pain, through her own lens. Her persona thus escapes typical framings of girlhood that exist in literature and cinema that focus on passivity and do not grant the girls an inner life. Mouchette maintains her agency while allowing her digital persona to fluctuate based on input from fans, visitors, and strangers, creating a dynamic and messy image of girlhood.
Figure 5. Martine Neddam, Mouchette.org: Version 1.0, 1996, interactive website. Collective purchase of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and MOTI. The purchase on the part of the Stedelijk Museum is generously supported by the Tijl Aankoop Fonds and a private donor, 2016.
Performing girlhood
I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much sees Pipilotti Rist performing in front of a camera, dancing, falling, and making faces, as The Beatles’s song “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” loops in the background. One can hear John Lennon singing “She’s not a girl who misses much,” a line he wrote about Yoko Ono. The work bears a resemblance to a music video given both the melodies and glitchy aesthetic reference the early TV era when female protagonists were usually painted in highly sexual ways that upheld beauty stereotypes. In Rist’s work, we see an attractive young woman singing and dancing, but it quickly becomes clear that she’s not there to satisfy the expectations of the male gaze.
Figure 6. Pipilotti Rist, I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much, 1994, video installation, 4 min. 57 sec. Gift from the artist.
Rist manipulates Lennon’s line into the first person, thereby positioning herself as the object of someone else’s desire. However, she embodies this subject strategically, entering it only to subvert it from within. Lennon’s words carry just enough ambiguity to leave room for listeners to project their own fantasies. While fantasies typically spark associations with idealized images, Rist offers anything but perfection. Her movements grow frantic, her voice takes on a squeaky tone, and her expressions acquire a theatrical mania.
Rist’s performance resonates with those integral to girlhood. Historically, young women have rarely been given the autonomy to define girlhood on their own terms. Instead, it has often been governed and contained by patriarchal and capitalist values. Society frequently pressures girls to mature quickly, abandon their playfulness, and transform into “proper” young women. Rist presents an alternative possibility. She appropriates gendered language while ridiculing it throughout her performance. This subversion allows her to both perform the subject of the “girl” while also challenging and redefining its meaning from within.
Together, these works expand traditional notions of girlhood. The exploration operates on multiple levels, redefining the term itself, crafting narratives that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, and replacing her prettiness with a subversive messiness. They invite us to reconsider girlhood not as a tidy package tied with a pink bow, but as a dynamic site of anxiety and play. From bedrooms to browsers, girlhood emerges as an evolving, multifaceted construct shaped by both personal experiences and cultural narratives.
About the Author
Mela Miekus is a student in the joint University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit master program Curating Art and Cultures. She graduated from Amsterdam University College with a bachelor in Liberal Arts and Sciences. From February 2024 to February 2025, she was a curator-in-training at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, working with Karen Archey and specializing in contemporary art, with a focus on time-based media. Her research interests include questions relating to identity and community formations and the politics of aesthetics.
[1] See Jenny Garber and Angela McRobbie,“Girls and Subcultures,” in Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, ed. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (London: Routledge, 1993), 209–22.
[2] See Stuart Morgan, “The Secret Life of Belly and Bone.” Ansuya Blom. Accessed January 21, 2025. https://ansuyablom.com/The-secret-life-of-belly-and-bone.
[3] See D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Playing and Reality (New York and London: Routledge, 1971), 1–25.
[4] “You might know it or not, but I’m a real text specialist, a poet and a manipulator, in one word: a wattlechick” (Mouchette)
