Identity Crisis

Identity Crisis, is a series of props, made in order to build an immersive environment holding “identity” together. The project brings to light, my own personal confusion and struggle, evaluating the meaning of identity. The installation consists of seven metal sculptures, each of which aims to re-examine identity and along, the notion of authenticity, through a forged theater. Steel and brass are used symbolically on the sculptures, while being trapped in nylon foil.

The sculptures pulse with an undercurrent of movement, trapped in the eternal cycle of growth, decay, and everything in between. I’m working on the project as a theater where the play is written by myself with the sculptures as actors reflect on contemporary society, often provoking us by presenting our online identities as the myths of our time. Under Antonin Artaud’s phrase “I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames” in Le Théâtre et son Double; there’s a moment when you catch a glimpse of yourself in them, but then, paradoxically, you encounter the complete opposite: an estrangement so foreign, yet irresistibly magnetic.

Nowadays, we face an alternation of the concrete idea of what a self, an identity, an authentic character means. These exact, once concrete, concepts go through a period of crisis. In Greek, word crisis means revision, something ceases to be original and turns into something new, without knowing its “destination”. The project analyses and stays with the process of identity under the commonly used phrase “identity crisis” which brings the two notions together. Drawing on Greek culture and contemporary European tensions, this work pays tribute to a succession of political occasions that influenced my own perspective on politics of identity.

Along, it uses narratives of beauty, masculinity, sex-provocation and eroticism; it explores them examining classical ideals of objects and figures, mirroring our contemporary values against a reservation of characteristics and elements that would be canonically considered as extravagant.