by Leni Cadle

I look down at a crime scene on the floor of the exhibition. The curved back, spikey ribs, and spindly, bent limbs form a collapsed metal body. This sculpture almost looks like an insect, the body is so weak and snappable.

Earlier this year I encountered Woman with Her Throat Cut, a bronze sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, at an exhibition at the Barbican in London. The exhibition, titled Encounters, paired the work of a surrealist sculptor Alberto Giacometti with contemporary British-Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum.

One sculpture within the exhibition was particularly memorable for me. This article discusses these thoughts: my initial interpretation and how it changed after further research.

Looking at Woman with Her Throat Cut sends shudders down your spine. The sculpture was placed not on a table or a plinth, but on the floor, at the feet of the viewers, as if we have stumbled upon the aftermath of something terrible. The body is abstracted, so it is initially not obvious what it – the angular, broken form – depicts. Yet the title very deliberately and disturbingly addresses the horror of its subject, in a blunt, emotionless statement. It felt evocative of the experience of the world today, reflecting the ongoing realities of human suffering of today that ceaselessly fill our news headlines.

The sculpture in the exhibition was positioned next to Hatoum’s glass sculpture of giant red splashes, a violent interpretation of Hockney’s The Splash. This curation made the bodily undertones of Giacometti’s piece feel all the more powerful, and the two sculptures resonated with one another. While neither artist directly depicted a specific war, the emotions they captured felt undeniably relevant. As a whole, the exhibition expressed the brutality of conflict and the impact of war on the human body.

After the exhibition, I began researching the sculpture. I read other descriptions of the artwork that describe it in ways I haven’t understood before: describing it as orgasmic, eroticising and sexualising. And I guess when they say that, it makes sense. Re-examining the artwork, now on the screen of my computer, I began to notice this – the arched back could be seen as orgasmic.

Woman with Her Throat Cut was created in 1932, at the height of surrealism. The movement was fascinated by the unconscious and the hidden aspects of human mind, combining themes of desire and destruction. Seen in that context, Giacometti’s piece can be interpreted through the eyes of male surrealist gaze – where the woman’s broken body has been eroticised, positioned as an object of desire and violence.

Reading this unsettled me. While the sculpture I viewed in the exhibition conveyed one meaning, the sculpture that I read about in research suggests another. Is the sculpture a statement against sexual violence, or a reflection of misogyny to be left in the past? Should we praise it as a timeless statement on human suffering, or shun its problematic past?

The answer, perhaps, is both. An artwork can have different meanings depending on the context that we view it in and the way we understand it. By placing Giacometti’s sculpture next to Hatoum’s installations, the curators reframe its violence not as erotic, but political. If the same sculpture was displayed in a natural history museum, then viewers might focus on its resemblance to an insect and its form. In the Barbican’s exhibition, however, the work became something else, telling a narrative of suffering and violence and inviting reflections on violence today.

In an interview, Hatoum herself acknowledges the sexual undertones of a Woman with Her Throat Cut, yet she states that it was the most important sculpture of his work in the exhibition. For her, the sculpture’s ambiguity is what matters and its ability to be interpreted by the viewer.

For me, Woman with Her Throat Cut reminds us that art doesn’t live in isolation, it isn’t just a photo on Google images or a page in a book. Its meaning shifts, depending on time, place and perspective. The piece is both disturbing and moving, outdated yet still deeply relevant. By learning about the sculpture’s origins, we must confront its uncomfortable past, and when exhibiting the sculpture in the present, such as the Barbican did, it opens up a conversation about violence in our own world today. From my journey of understanding the sculpture, I take the opinion that we don’t have to praise or reject it. The artwork isn’t easy to look at, but I think that’s the point: the discomfort is what makes it necessary.

This was adapted from a talk that I gave at the Whitworth Student Symposium on 29 October 2025.

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