This oeuvre of work by me is about performing the Self. It’s a series of 4 photographic film stills perpetuated in a cinematic way. This work explores the deconstructed ideas of gender roles and gender-related expectations through self-created characters with the use of staged photography, wigs and costume. This series allows me to reincarnate into different characters and at the same time, direct, perform/act and photograph, enabling her to investigate more about the politics of the self. With the camera, the gaze and the participation, she believes that there is always politics being in front and behind the camera.

 

Although the images stand alone without any visual guidance with the likes of any texts to explain its context, it is rendered as performative, perpetuating a conversation or a speech the characters are having probably with themselves or amongst themselves, leaving it up to the imagination of the viewers, developing their own concept of the self. Nevertheless, the title You got me thinkin’ about Sexism, perpetuates a kind informed language about chauvinism, gender bias, discrimination against women etcetera, therefore allowing the viewers to be able to conceive their own inner thoughts about the topic revolving around sexism and completing the work with a conversation from their own experiences.

 

By responding to this work, it exposed certain underpinnings of silence (that was imposed on women) and evokes a kind of female empowerment in the female viewers. The work does not seek to provoke, neither do they represent every woman but more so an affirmation for women and their place in this patriarchal society, that they are unstoppable once they realized that their self-worth is not based on the mere reflection in the mirror but what they stand for and believe in.

 

With the camera, the gaze and the participation, there is always politics being in front and behind the camera. With reference to a chapter from Gaze Regimes by Christina Von Braun ;

“For the spectator, the feeling of supremacy created by identification with the view of the camera combines with a feeling of powerlessness, because the eye of the camera is determined by someone or something else (the director, the camera, etc.). Thus, a double identification arises - on the one hand with the eye of the camera, i.e. the subject of the gaze, and on the other hand with the actors and the roles that they embody, i.e. the objects of the gaze, which, unlike the objects of the photograph, are perceived as an active subject.”

 

In my work, I want the viewers to be able to experience both power and powerlessness. Powerlessness being the former explained above as I part take all roles in being in control of the shots, I shoot, direct and perform in the series and the power that I am giving the viewers is the cinematic pleasure of an illusion of peering in on a private world of these characters.

 

With the photographic approach, it allows me to create a moment, a time or a situation where I could reincarnate myself into different characters. These moments that I am talking about, they are pseudo moments or staged authenticity to emulate a photographic film still. The use of photography as a medium to me is important because it is fluid in terms of representing an image, yet specific in the presentation.

 

Below are some of the shots that were experimental and an important process of character building in my work.