Identity formation and construction is a complex process and a very relevant issue in today's society. Developing a clear view of ourselves and of our identity is indeed important for our personal wellbeing. Yet this exploration of the self turns in our times into a very complicated operation.
Some of us struggle to accept themselves as they are; others seem to have clear views about who they are, but they still have to fight against certain stereotypes imposed by society. Besides, online social communities, virtual platforms and the digital world, encourage us to create hundreds of identities. We can have a super cool digital avatar online or in a videogame, who may live extraordinary adventures we can only dream of; or maybe, dissatisfied with who we are or alienated with ourselves we can live our lives through a filter, posting on social media images of who we would like to be, reinforcing in this way our obsession with alternative selves.
The theme of identity is currently being explored in a timely exhibition entitled "Role Play" (running until 27th June), organized by Fondazione Prada, that opened yesterday at the Osservatorio in Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (check it out if you're in town for the fashion week).
Curated by Melissa Harris, the event includes a selection of photographic, video and performing works by 11 international image-based artists interrogating their own individuality and questioning gender roles and tropes and stereotypes.
All the projects and installations included look at different themes, from the notions of the search for a personal identity to the invention of an alternative identity. While researching the exhibition, Harris looked at a variety of mediums, from Instagram to online gaming, cosplay and, last but not least, the new identities we had to build during Covid-19 with face masks that erased half of our faces, but offered us to start focusing more on our eyes.
The creation of the self we are witnessing in our times can therefore be analysed from different perspectives: pretending to be somebody else, a digitally enhanced version of our own selves - taller, thinner and with fewer lines and perfect skin - may be an innocent game that may turn into a dangerous exercise if this process starts having an impact on our expectations about ourselves, pushing us towards serious depression. Modifying our identity, lying about who we are or how old we are and what we look like, or arriving to steal the identity of somebody else online can have serious consequences.
But the exhibition at the Osservatorio also reminds us that role playing can mean also creating positive alter-egos, new selves and alternative identities that allow us to understand our essence.
In the press release accompanying the event the curator Melissa Harris, reminds us indeed that, "Since the early twentieth century, projects engaging role play have further contemplated identity, liberating artists to gender-bend and time-travel and envision their selves in myriad ways, in turn reflecting on their very is-ness - even when that is in flux. An alter ego, persona, or avatar may be aspirational; it may relate to one's personal and cultural history and sense of otherness; it may be a form of activism, or a means of maneuvering through entrenched, even polarized positions, toward empathy: putting oneself in another's shoes."
Harris' words remind us of the performative nature in creating an alter ego and immediately conjure up visions of chameleon artist Cindy Sherman who investigates otherness through a myriad of portraits in which she erases her identity in favour of someone else's, creating through her photographs a rich visual language. Photography is actually the ideal medium to create new narratives about ourselves through portraits, self-portraits, reportages.
"Role Play" features works by a group of young artists tackling these themes through a variety of mediums, from photographs to videos.
For her photographic series, "OMIAI♡" (2001), Tomoko Sawada transformed herself - through costumes, wigs, make-up, and weight gain - into thirty different characters. These portraits mimic photographs traditionally produced as part of the Japanese custom of omiai, or the first meeting of couples whose marriages are being arranged, during which families exchange pictures of their children in the hope of finding a suitable partner for them.
Entire families at times become the protagonists of the artist's world: most members of the cast in the video "Guided Tour of a Spill (CAPS Interlude)" (2021), by Meriem Bennani, a mash up of amateur videos from Moroccan and Middle Eastern online channels combined with Getty footage and with audiovisual materials from the artist's archive, are part of her family and play themselves, but have to role play as if they were in the future and on an island called the CAPS.
If some artists play with imaginary characters playing in fantasy spaces, others come up with a fictitious identity that mysteriously moves through real locations. In 2014 Amalia Ulman launched her "Excellences & Perfections", a five-month performance on her Instagram account where she fabricated a fictional character and pretended the selfies taken sneaking into hotels and restaurants in Los Angeles were a reportage of her real life. The project allowed her to investigate the aestheticization of everyday life in social media through the careful use of sets, props, and communication strategies, while showing how an audience can be manipulated through the use of mainstream archetypes. The project was only announced as an artistic performance afterwards, further blurring the boundaries between the authentic and the artificial, reality and its stereotypical representation.
But while Ulman played a sort of influencer wannabe, Cao Fei explored the life of a cosplayer (a young individual dressed as a game character) in a cinematic video. Through a surreal film the protagonists, wearing costumes that grant them true magical powers, travel through a city and engage in combat within their imaginary world.
Other artists opt for alternative identities to explore social issues: Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley evoke through their video "The Rape of Europa" (2021) two parallel worlds - mythological (Europa's, as suggested by Titian in 1562 and inspired by Ovid's "Metamorphoses") and historical - while addressing the subjugation and exploitation of women in the process and the contradictions of white feminism.
The enigmatic artist and performer Narcissister, featured in the exhibition with her video "Breast Work" (2020), and her autobiographical film, "Narcissister Organ Player" (2018), explores how ancestral and familiar data is stored in our bodies, impacting the lives we lead.
Narcissister usually wears plastic masks (also included in the exhibition) that make her look like a mannequin and, through her elaborate costumes, humor and eroticism she tells her own story, revealing her experience growing up and feeling ostracized in blonde-haired, blue-eyed Southern California as the child of a Sephardic Jewish mother and an African-American father.
There are other artists exploring racism in the exhibition: documentary photographers Haruka Sakaguchi and Griselda San Martin, explore racial bias through "Typecast" (2019), a satirical portrait series addressing the lack of diversity in the US entertainment and film industry.
For this series they photographed actors embodying the typecast roles offered frequently and parts they aspire to play, in a game of identities swapped (the racism is clear when you read about a Black Latina with 9 years of acting experience often typecast as a prostitute while she dreams of acting as lawyer or an Asian American woman typecast as a geisha who would actually love to be Supergirl and there's more to check on the project's site).
We often look at digital doppelgangers in a negative way, but not all avatars are negative: "Consciousness Engine 2: absentblackfatherbot" (2013) by Bogosi Sekhukhuni is a two-screen video installation that simulates the artist's relationship with his estranged father as part of his ongoing investigation into human consciousness in an age of digital networks. The avatars of the two speakers, two disembodied heads animated in 3D, bring to life with robotic voices an intense conversation drawn from Facebook chats that took place when the artist was eighteen years old.
All these projects show us that having an alternative identity is not necessarily bad, as it can help us tackling personal matters we may not feel comfortable about or analysing contemporary social and cultural issues.
"Role Play" will generate its own "alter-ego" at Prada Aoyama Tokyo in the form of another show that will launch in Tokyo from 11th March to 20th June 2022 with the support of Fondazione Prada.
Comments