The question of identity, a complex topic, has always been at the center of fascinating speculations of a sociological, artistic, literary, philosophical, ethnological, psychological nature, which over the centuries have tried to answer the most disruptive and enigmatic questions “who are you?”.
A series of works created by the artist reflecting on the concept of “Identity”. The question of identity, a complex topic, has always been at the center of fascinating speculations of a sociological, artistic, literary, philosophical, ethnological, psychological nature, which over the centuries have tried to answer the most disruptive and enigmatic questions “who are you?”.
The identity question carries within it the seed of its opposite (what are you not?), the seed of the limits that we set in our mind and in our daily life in an attempt to define and make ourselves recognizable in some way, the seed of questioning itself, because our self-image almost never corresponds to the image the others have of us.
The variety of ways in which identity is expressed make the topic even more complex: alongside an individual identity (who I am) there is always a collective identity which concerns the roles in which, from time to time time, depending on the context, we identify ourselves; gender, personal, political, working, ethnic, social identity and in which of the many possible identity territories we are placed and, therefore, identified by those who look at us.
We are thus the Pirandello’s “Hundred Thousand”, or the matryoshka men mentioned by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his 1948 essay «Sense and Nonsense»: “if one could open one of them, all the others would be found there as in Russian dolls, or rather, not so well ordered, in a state of indivision”.
Katarzyna Bąk deals with this theme by describing in her works the continuous attempt, and therefore the perennial change, of defining the human being. The artist takes up the concepts of “reprogramming” and Tabula Rasa – the wax tablets that in ancient Rome could be erased from previous writings, to be written again – as a metaphor for the inner changes and the possibilities that each of us has of rewriting his own destiny, their own personal and identity history.
This metaphor is evident in the works on display. In the series entitled “Logos”, on the white space of the canvas, the artist traces in black color the writings in various languages: the empty space begins to embrace something that defines, fills and distinguishes it.
The black marks in some parts of the canvas appear more firm and clearer, while in others the white color tends to make them opaque, as if they were about to fade, in order to accommodate others. The traits, however, remain visible, like corrections of the path that „mark” our identity and allow us to remember them, as errors from which we can learn, without eliminating them. Edited by Giorgia Fileni