self-portrait
Video, single-channel, in development
self-portrait is a video work an ongoing video work that explores how personal documentation becomes performance under digital capitalism. The artist records herself doing pull-ups, deliberately framing the shot to exclude her face. The work resists the conventions of visibility and aspirational self-branding that dominate digital platforms.
This gesture becomes a broader inquiry into how contemporary media blurs the line between expression and marketing. From fitness and wellness to lifestyle and productivity, the Internet promotes aspirational aesthetics as emotional bait — subtle performances of happiness, control, and ease, constructed for others and internalized as benchmarks of self-worth. The repetition of these messages conditions us to equate visibility with value, and performance with identity.
self-portrait engages themes of self-surveillance, internalized branding, and algorithmic legibility. What does it mean to document one’s body — for progress, for proof, or simply out of habit? How are acts of private strength made intelligible to systems that strip them of context and recirculate them as content?
Rather than offering a narrative of transformation, the work stages a refusal. It does not reject the body, but the demand that the body must always mean something — must always be improving, marketable, or consumed. This is not an image of aspiration, but a portrait of resistance: against the pressure to be visible, against the monetization of care, against the expectation that every gesture should resolve into a brand.
Still in development, the work evolves through ongoing recordings and critical reflection, staging a refusal to resolve the image into transformation — and inviting viewers to consider the radical potential of what is left unshown.
