Why Women Artists Use Screams to Express Female Rage

In Elsa Rouy’s expansive paintings, bodies writhe and merge with one another, their contortions evocative of deep pleasure and unbearable pain. For “The Screaming Object,” her latest exhibition at Guts Gallery in London, which closed last month, the British artist presented a 7.5-meter-long frieze, which combines sexual carnality, tenderness, and brutal emotion. “The scream in my work is used as an expulsion of emotion and it’s never defined whether this emotion is good or not,” said the artist. “I intentionally make the faces ambiguously contorted so it’s hard to know the exact feeling.”

Guttural screaming has appeared in many works by women artists since the mid–20th century, from those by Marina Abramović to Faith Ringgold and Tracey Emin. This March, British conceptual artist Saskia Takens-Milne will host a “scream-along” in London as part of Women’s History Month, challenging “audiences to consider the consequences of the normalisation of women’s suffering in media.” While Edvard Munch’s iconic painting of a deathly pale face emitting a distressing howl has found its way to art historical superstardom, these contemporary screams offer a more specific expression of gendered societal oppression. In a culture that expects women to be silent—to hold their pain and trauma without complaint—screaming can be a powerful outlet.

“I think the screams in my paintings are screams of wanting to be heard, seen, and, in the artworks, to dominate the space,” said Rouy. “There is so much power in a scream, and in a world where it’s so easy to be dismissed, quietened, or toned down, a scream breaks through the shit and asserts a position that is forceful and unavoidable.”

Rouy’s screams are silent, expressed through frenzied markmaking and twisted bodies that seem to express inner feelings on the outside. Through the visual medium of painting, the artist viscerally calls to mind the sound of primal howls. “A scream is easy to recreate and, upon seeing one, I think we make the sound in our head,” said Rouy. “I think it’s less about the image of the scream and more how powerful and unsettling screams are in reality. Paintings just act as a memory of this.”

Youjin Yi similarly explores the tension of screaming as it exists between the visual and aural. Many of the artist’s works place humans in wild, abstracted natural settings. Her figures are depicted in a vibrant array of colors, their borders often appearing to melt into space around them. In her painting Silent Scream (2022), a kneeling nude figure sits with their head in their hands, and face covered. The scream here is not only implied by the helpless pose of the central figure, but also by the bird sitting on her head with its beak wide open as though letting out a cacophonous call. The painting “reflects the tension between internal and external worlds,” said the artist. “It captures the paradox of voicelessness in moments of profound expression, where a scream is felt but not heard, symbolizing suppressed expression or unspoken struggles.”

The image of a muffled scream has also been used by contemporary artists to address the social silencing of Black women, whose rage is often stigmatized and invalidated. Faith Ringgold utilized the contrast between silence and pained expression in her soft sculpture The Screaming Woman (1981), shown in her retrospective at the New Museum in 2022. The figure represents a wailing Black mother, personifying a narrative that is often left out of discussions around racially motivated violence in the U.S. The figure clutches a newspaper, bearing the headline “Save Our Children in Atlanta.” The piece is part of a wider series responding to the murders of at least 28 Black children and young people in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981, many of which have remained unsolved.

This work evocatively highlights the difficulty in being heard: Ringgold’s figure’s scream has nowhere to go, and there is no promise of comfort or resolution. “As a result of feelings that were getting out of control, I began making art that I called wild,” said Ringgold of the series. “The work was about the slain Atlanta children. I wanted to recapture the mothers’ pain when they identified their dead children.”

Other contemporary artists have focused on the unsettling sound of screaming, filling performance or gallery spaces with a cacophony of emotionally loaded noise. Marina Abramović has used the scream in several different works. In her 2013 collaborative performance work The Scream, an homage to Munch, she and 270 Oslo citizens screamed out loud in front of Ekeberg Park—the landscape that inspired his paintings. Her earlier performance Freeing the Voice (1976) featured her screaming for three hours, until her voice ran out. Here, the artist allowed herself to release a scream in its extreme entirety, as though leaving nothing else trapped inside. Two years later, she faced her partner and regular collaborator Ulay, and the two screamed at one another for 15 minutes.

Abramović has described screaming as an act of cleansing the mind and body, highlighting the importance of taking part in this riotous act that many people suppress. In her memoir Walk Through Walls, the Serbian artist writes about the release made possible by Freeing the Voice: “I screamed at the top of my lungs, shrieking out all my frustration with everything: Belgrade, Yugoslavia, my mother, my entrapment. I screamed until my voice was gone…” The performance of screaming also featured heavily in Tate’s 2023 exhibition “Women in Revolt,” with Gina Birch’s pivotal 1977 video 3 Minute Scream capturing the riotous rage that was woven throughout the show.

A lifelong admirer of Munch’s work, Tracey Emin has referenced his infamous painting of a person screaming multiple times in her videos, paintings, and sculptures. For example, Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children (1998) responds to the theft of the original painting The Scream (1893) from the National Gallery in Oslo. A group of radical anti-abortionists falsely claimed they stole the work, and said they would only return it on the condition that a national television network broadcast an anti-abortion film. Emin’s work depicts the artist curled up on the end of a pier, in which the calming sound of waves is interrupted by a pained shriek, reflecting her own experiences of abortions and internal conflicts surrounding them.

More recently, the artist painted herself with her mouth covered by intense black marks, in Crying – Shouting – Screaming – Was Not Going to Help Me Live (from A Journey To Death) (2021), following her cancer diagnosis and treatment. Here, Emin visualizes the practical ineffectiveness of such intense vocalizations in the face of possible death, while expressing the cathartic release they might provide.