Curatorial Statement — Ontologies of Becoming: Performativity, Embodiment, and the Interstitial Realms of Female Subjectivity
This photographic compendium interrogates the multilayered cartographies of identity formation within the liminal thresholds of contemporary femininity. Mobilizing the female body as both medium and message, the works articulate an embodied praxis of becoming—an open-ended, processual negotiation of the self that is contingent, performative, and materially inscribed.
Drawing on poststructuralist frameworks of gender as performative (Butler) and subjectivity as assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari), the series destabilizes any essentialist reading of female identity. Each image acts as an interstice where the subject performs selfhood not as a stable ontology, but as a mutable, recursive articulation. These figures are not captured; they are constructed through the very lens that mediates them—an apparatus of both exposure and concealment.
The mise-en-scène of each photograph constructs semiotic environments—baroque interiors, desaturated domesticities, eroticized limbos, urban decay, and natural excess—that serve as discursive fields for identity inscription. Here, the spatial is not neutral but performative, scripting corporeal gestures, emotional valences, and psychic negotiations. The subjects operate within and against these environments, oscillating between compliance, transgression, and reinvention.
Simultaneously, the deployment of nudity and sartorial signifiers operates as a visual rhetoric of vulnerability, control, and self-authorship. The female form, fragmented and aestheticized, becomes a site of both sociopolitical inscription and counter-hegemonic agency. Tattoos, body modifications, posture, and gaze interpellate the viewer, resisting passive consumption while inviting complex readings of power, desire, and autonomy.
This series is not a linear bildungsroman but a palimpsestic archive of becoming—a visualized semiotic field where femininity is neither origin nor endpoint but an iterative production. The works resist closure, inviting a reading that remains always provisional, always contingent on the viewer’s own epistemological frameworks.
In privileging ambiguity, contradiction, and multiplicity, the collection ultimately functions as a discursive intervention. It challenges reductive paradigms of the female subject and posits identity as an unstable assemblage, always in flux—always becoming.
List of Photos at Saatchi Gallery with Links
