The Invisible Portraits of My Mind
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Dates2017 - Ongoing
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Author
- Location South Tangerang, Indonesia
I would say that I often don’t understand myself. I don’t understand the thoughts that keep coming to me, the vivid and intense emotions that carried me to the dark world that can only be visible to me, in my mind. After many breakdowns and anxiety that often happened, I questioned myself: “Is it the side effect of a childhood trauma? Or is it some natural phase everyone has? Or is it some kind of distress?”
This project is a compilation of my self-portraits that I made from the year of 2017 until now. These self-portraits have become my way to explore and process the invisible emotions and thoughts that I’m hardly able to express in daily interaction. I use my body as a medium for telling these subjective experiences that may or may not be experienced by others.
At the first time I went into making my first self-portrait, it didn’t occur to me that it would be a continuous project. Each time I make a self-portrait, it is more like an instinct carried away by my emotions and even some are created as a thematic challenge with my friend. But after looking back at them, I realized that these self-portraits are not merely an idea, but it is actually like a puzzle of myself, it brings out pieces of me one by one, regarding my thoughts, emotions, and the unconscious. The images that I presented here reflect many pieces of me, from the story of my past traumas, my emotional landscape, grief, regrets, and angst in life.
That is why these self-portraits are really important to me to develop more in the future. They give me chances to explore and process myself as well as it is a therapeutic experience when I’m making them.