ORIGINS – A CROWDED IDENTITY

by Hanif Janmohamed, February 2023

Hanif Janmohamed, Cranial Cosmology, Self Portrait, 2013. Backlit Lightbox 24″ x 24″

The Inner Selfie Project has its origins in a self-portrait I made in 2013. Cranial Cosmology, a backlit digital collage of medical scan, earth imaging, cartography and data visualization – its origins were an ongoing series called Brain Terrains, a quixotic exploration of the in-between world of human experience using medical and satellite imaging – whose origins lie in an earlier body of work called Cellular Landscapes, a scenographic approach to an imagined cellular life.

My own origins are similarly relational. As a child in Kenya, I was always so-and-so’s son, an identity located somewhere in a constellation outside myself. Growing up, a patchwork of geographic, ethnic, cultural, racial, religious, social, and professional affinities provided a steady supply of possible identities – an embarrassment of choice. A multitude of selves that in turn opened up a rich interstitial experience in the shadows of identities to which I never belonged.

The qualities of this marginal experience feel like being in a Souk – a grand bazaar of negotiations, characterized by arguments and agreements, barter and bargaining. It’s a transitional ‘maybe’ space. Like an unsettled settlement in an occupied territory, at times it’s copacetic, sometimes it’s an uneasy detente, at other times contested, and occasionally it’s a celebratory multiplicity. Small wonder then, that I loved such liberal use of the word “forse” in Italy (and its counterpart “magari”).

For me, this crowded marketplace feels like the true domain of the Self – an entity whose existence is woven together by a continuity of narrative threads, beliefs and behaviours – all somehow witnessed internally. I cannot claim to fully inhabit either a private being (which mostly runs itself) or a public context (which remains a little beyond my grasp), and so I remain cradled (and a little bewildered) in the meta-space of the confluence of the two – where I have become familiar with the porosity of defining boundaries.

Hanif Janmohamed, Self Portrait with Glasses, 2012. Shadow Box. 24″ x 24″

IMPOSTOR SYNDROME – THERE’S NO ONE  HOME

Two living bodies, improbable entities made of dust and liquid – a huge yet tiny planetary body (planemo) and a tiny yet huge human body (a menimo?) The intersection of the two gives rise to an experience of me, from which I generate a whispered sense of Self. I am curious about the recursions and repetitions of form that occur at scale between these two domains.

Technologically-mediated observation reveals what we cannot see for ourselves. Medical and satellite imaging scan these spaces that we each ‘inhabit’ as individuals and as a collective, and the micro/macro investigations surface a shared language of curiously similar patterns and forms at vastly different scales. It’s a common visual lexicon of a fractal-like repetition. The explorations are also interesting in what they don’t reveal.

Where is the Self? Does it not have a locus? We can lose parts from either domain and still maintain a sense of Self – lose a body part, or a close friendship, and we still remain mostly ourselves. Conversely, we can lose our sense of Self with both environments seemingly intact – Alzheimer’s, dementia, schizophrenia, mental illness and other hijacks. Until we lose our heads, either literally or figuratively, the idea of Self can still be conjured.

An imagined entity then, perhaps? We might imagine the Self as one of Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, invisibly distributed across time and space. Or maybe the Self is simply a self-forming, temporal fiction – like a smoke ring. Actors strutting and fretting our hour upon the stage – no longer animals and miserable as gods, perhaps the Self is an emanation of uncertainty, living within time, neither a thing nor quite a nothing, formed by external forces and internal gravities.

Hanif Janmohamed, Shanghai at Night Backlit Lightbox, 24″ x 32″

CHARLATANS UNITE – THE SELF AS A PLACE OF AGREEMENTS

This road leads to inevitable questions about our contagious selfie culture and the relentless collective fixation with affirming our represented selves through a curious externalized, collective mirroring. We affirm ourselves by being seen, gaining more solidity through a collective agreement – we like to be liked. The more I’m liked the more I am. What is this communal cultural narcissism? What do we actually affirm? Perhaps we need to corroborate the private agreements we make about our identities, in the public arena, a fractal exercise in affirmation of what we project – we want to believe and so we do.

I enjoyed reading Jonardon Ganeri’s – Inwardness and other wonderful philosophical, fictional and non-fictional works that reflect on the idea of a Self/No-Self while thinking about this public engagement initiative. X marks the spot – that curious intersection of inner and outer worlds that marks the crossing of a boundless, poetic, interstitial space.

The Inner Selfie project is a social experiment. It is an exploration of who we believe we are and the nature of the agreements we make with ourselves, without referencing the typical markers of identity. It takes participants on a voyage into this space of agreements with a series of prompts and an invitation to look within. It is a reflecting pool where quiet contemplation rules over an instantaneous representation.

The hybrid virtual and physical public project invites participants to share representations of themselves, through an exercise of self-reflection and creation. Online, the medical MRI is a metaphor for a scan through the soft tissues of narratives of the Self and acts as a container for a playful co-creation of patterns. colours and lines. In the Gallery, a physical maker space invites visitors to conjure self-representations through a haptic experience of making and constructing with found materials.

Both are manufactured manifestations of our evanescent sense of Self – like ourselves, infinite representations made with finite means. Inner Selfies offer all of us, both those who create them and those who view them, a reason to step back and question assumptions about identity, discover new expressions for our inner worlds, and renew connections with feelings, meanings, and questions about ourselves.

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Virtual Selfies-Website

Inner Selfies created with the online Inner Selfie Drawing Tool, by visitors to the Inner Selfie public website.

Physical Selfies – Maker Space

Inner Selfies created by visitors to The Inner Selfie Maker Space in The Art Gallery of Ontario’s Community Art Gallery, (Photo Credit: Natalie Lam).

Collection shot

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Artists’ Statement & Credits

MARIA LANTIN

At some point in my 20s, I got rid of all the mirrors in my apartment, as an experiment. That broke something in a good way. It broke a habit of discounting what it feels like to just be. In my 40s I fell into a two-month-deep rabbit hole of whether free will is a useful concept as it’s commonly understood. I feel like there’s always been a quest to ‘look behind the curtain’. So when Hanif had me fill out the Brain Terrains questionnaire and produced a beautiful collage of my answers anchored by a brain MRI filled with a map instead of a brain, I was intrigued.

When he said he wanted to do something more interactive, more public, I was in. It has been a chaotic journey getting the Inner Selfie project where it’s at and it made me realize that the supply chain issues are not just about things. We are all struggling with learning to give each other what we need as we head out of a pandemic. I learned that the unfamiliar has no name and that’s ok.

I hope that this project brings some moments of creative delight. It sure did for us as we were creating it. Much gratitude to all the many contributors that participated in the ideas generation, the scaffolding, the pipe-fitting, the priming, the cutting, the cleaning, the whole workflow – material, digital, and emotional. You are beautiful.

Maria Lantin, July 3 2022.

HANIF JANMOHAMED

This current manifestation of an open, public co-creation platform, at the AGO, with the deceptively simple Inner-Selfie Generator, was developed in a wonderful collaboration with Maria Lantin. The project as it stands is a much-reduced facsimile of what we set out to create. The pandemic added some unique development challenges to our production. We lost participants to inflated costs, illness and other vagaries and had to find our agility super-powers. Maria piloted the project through the recurrent wrinkles that rose up regularly. It had an outsize impact on all of us – we are truly grateful for all the support for the project’s completion.

Like any good adventure, we had ambitious plans. Where we set out to go, the terrains we mapped, the people we engaged with, the things we learned, and the things we had to let go along the way to get to where we got – is a truly wonderful arc.

Much gratitude to all involved. I’m hooked on the doodle and the playful outcomes of the Inner Selfie, it’s addictive.

Hanif Janmohamed, June 28, 2022

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CREDITS

COLLABORATIVE FRAMEWORKS

Inner Selfies is a co-creation project started by Hanif Janmohamed in 2013. It has evolved with the support of many wonderful partners as it makes its way to the ocean – still far off on the distant horizon.

INNER SELFIES @ THE AGO

Hanif Janmohamed

Maria Lantin

ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO

Paola Poletto, Director, Engagement & Learning

Melissa Smith, Assistant Curator, Access & Learning

It’s been an adventure. Gratitude and unreserved thanks to all.

The artists and the AGO acknowledge the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts for this project through the Digital Strategy Fund.

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https://inner-selfie.ca/

https://hanifjanmohamed.com/

https://marialantin.com/

Art, Brain, Creativity, Installation