Featuring Juno Calypso, Mat Collishaw, Polly Morgan, Christopher Page, Boo Saville, Julia Thompson & Bengt Tibet.
‘Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.’
Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
How many selves do we have and would friendship blossom if they met? Perhaps Best Self would admire the bravery of Make-up-free Self and praise her ‘courage’? Lurking Self might compliment Public Self for ‘putting it out there’ as Masochist Self basks in the heat of Hot Self’s disdain.
Fiction thinks estrangement is a more likely outcome. Young Self Dorian Gray stabs the portrait of Aged Self and takes his own life in the process. Best Self Sue in The Substance is repulsed by Worst Self Elisabeth’s binge-eating and keeps her locked in a cupboard.
The more abundantly we possess wealth, youth and beauty, the more we seek to elude death. The pursuit of eternal life, or Transhumanism, is funded by billionaires with too much to relinquish to consider an end. The wellness and beauty industry are the new granters of indulgences. Using terms like ‘longevity protocol’ and ‘anti-aging’ they promise an escape from the hell of senescence if we only grease their baby-soft palms.
