Fluid identities

Dreams are the medium through which our sub consciousness „speaks“, they are the fantasy which draws its genesis, from the personal – from growing, from real activities, experience, fears, frustrations, happiness and anger, from constant unrest and a confusing question: Who am I? What defines my unique identity? Is it connected with sexuality, with sex and gender, with upbringing and social norms; are there fixed, once for all established identities, or are they changing? Are identities fluid?

“Fashion changing identity,” an early 2004 video, provides a framework for addressing this complex issue. How many different roles do we play in just one period of our lives and are some of them opposed to each other or do they participate, as parts of a homogeneous puzzle, in the whole idea that a person has about him/herself? The focus of this work is performativity, the way we present ourselves and the way we participate in the world, with others. Mixed genders, undefined identities, the twisted, strange and abnormal ones, are the provisions of a grotesque couple, Josephine and Lily, who destroy the ‘basic cell of society’, tearing the heterosexual matrix to pieces. Thus, the question of gender arises again, and with it madness. Josephine and Lily are the embodiment of pure madness, according to Foucault’s poisoned state of awakeness. They are the delirium that makes reality surreal. A doctor, as a representative of a “healthy” society and as a “priest” who performs conversion, is the only one who can oppose his power to illness. Is it possible to recover from pure madness? Asylum methods of electroshocks, lobotomies, erasing every dangerous thought, killing a desire that is not prescribed and that disturbs the strictly established order, are the only ways to bring madness under control. However, this type of distortion, which functions in parallel with the real, can hardly have any contact with it. The excessive intensity of madness must be abolished, in the impossibility of dealing with it. But it does not disappear, but only changes its form; in order to survive, it must adapt to the real, hide within a form that mediates between reality and fantasy, life and death. The symbolic depiction of that meeting place is shown in the image of Anubis, a monster, a prodigy, “The Nameless one”, a card of a human skeleton.

Anubis’mummification, 6′ 45”, 2009

Schizoid dream of a body, 5′ 25”, 2006

Fashion changing identity, 3′ 25”, 2004