Shaped by ancestry, society, and history, material belongings and body embellishments have always served to communicate an individual’s sense of self; clothing and possessions are the fundamental elements through which self-image is expressed. As an outward manifestation of one’s inner most sensibilities and subjectivities, people perform their identities and position themselves in relation to the world around them. Influencing how the self is represented and seen, photography plays a significant role in the social and cultural construction of identity.

Material Self: Performing the Other Within brings together photo-based works by eight artists from the four corners of the world, all of whom explore the potential of clothing, costume, uniform, and props to communicate character and to draw a bridge across distances. They fuse cultures, traditions, and customs, linking the past to the present through performative gestures that reveal breakdowns in cultural boundaries and the cross-pollination of identities. While many of them reflect upon their heritage, rituals, and the country in which they live, some seek to examine distant mythologies and internal experiences. Each of the artists make use of materials, props, and associated iconographies and signifiers to articulate shifting identities, while challenging stereo-types and fixed expectations. They bring to light the other within, an entity of the self that emerges from their images.

Through carefully staged photographic portraits, Hendrik Kerstens links the tradition of his Dutch culture with the present. Since 1996, Kerstens has used his daughter Paula as his subject, taking portraits of her since she was a young girl. Each image makes reference to 17th-century Dutch painting through the evocation of “Dutch” light, the serenity of Paula’s poses, and the austere settings. Such classic compositions, however, are offset by Kerstens’ subtle insertions of distinctly modern materials, including a white plastic bag positioned a top Paula’s head in replication of a lace hood (Bag, 2007); and aluminum foil molded into a wide-brimmed hat (Aluminium Foil, 2012). These disruptions pull the image into the present, while revealing the transformative capacity of everyday objects. In the process, he creates a dialogue with his cultural heritage that addresses art’s ability to construct a false sense of the subject’s identity and immortality, reflecting the likeness of people across the ages and mystery of the other within.

Charles Fréger’s work focuses on a very different form of European tradition, which has led to his travel across 18 countries in search of the “Wild Man.” This legendary figure dates back to Neolithic times, is often associated with Shamanism, and continues to be a part of festivals mark-ing the change of seasons or certain rites of passage. In the series Wilder Mann (2010–11), Fréger, who lives in France, documents the various incarnations of this figure within the celebrants’ native landscape. His full-length portraits focus on their elaborate garments crafted from natural materials such as animal skins, local plants, bones, and antlers, which transform the wearer into mythic creatures. For Fréger, who has found these same pagan rituals practiced in places more than 12,000 kilometres apart, the series points to the endurance and continued relevance of this aspect of European cultural identity. It reveals a primal aspect of human identity—a wildness within—that has been set aside along the path to “civilized” society.

Namsa Leuba shares Fréger’s interest in rituals and customs that derive from long-standing traditions. A woman of dual ancestry, Leuba travelled from her home in Switzerland to her mother’s region in Guinea, West Africa to study its people and customs. Her photographic series Ya Kala Ben (2011) conflates Western sensibilities with traditional values using unidentifiable locations, props, and configurations. Working with live models, Leuba re-imagines African cultural artifacts and cosmological symbols, removing their connection to the spirit world. While the artist acknowledges this as a form of desecration that astonished some in the Guinean community, she acts with the intention of examining pre-conceived notions of African identity held by the West. The African statuette was Leuba’s source for African Queens (2012), which derives from the language of fashion and the context of her role as a commercial photographer. Leuba’s photographs, while provocative, reflect the potentially conflicting cultures that inform her identity, and her attempt to understand them both distinctly and in relation to each other in the construction of self.

The spirit world, where Leuba’s ritual artifacts find their source, is also a place of inspiration for Meryl McMaster. Her series In-Between Worlds (2010–13) explores the liminal state between two cultural identities, namely her own Aboriginal and Euro-Canadian ancestries. McMaster enacts ritualistic movements and postures in various guises, creating dream-like scenes that hang in a state of suspended belief. By capturing sequential moments within a performance, these photographs appear to collapse the sense of time and space. McMaster dons dramatic makeup and fabricates theatrical ensembles comprised of textiles, beads, and natural materials such as twigs and pinecones. Her costumes and props contain references and symbols that express her mixed cultural heritage, made all the more elaborate against the stark backdrop of icy, snow-covered landscapes in remote Canadian settings. Her images reflect a process of self-discovery in which McMaster positions herbi-cultural heritage as a source of synergistic strength rather than a struggle between opposites.

Dominique Rey performs for the camera in the natural land-scape, an approach that shares affinities with McMaster’s work. Both physically transform themselves through costuming and props, with Rey’s personas veering into the complex emotional terrain of the unconscious, embracing the repulsive, titillating, and humorous while expressing the other within. In Erlking (2011), the Canadian artist draws from the German Erlkönig, a fable of a malevolent being—known as “Erlking” in English—said to await unsuspecting travellers in the wilderness. Such a creature recalls Charles Fréger’s “Wild Man,” another beast-like figure from European lore. But where Fréger documented existing incarnations, Rey brings the Erlking into the modern age through a personal manifestation of altereity. She uses fluorescent colour and artificial material to create bulbous forms that transform her appearance. Her performances occur in remote locations of Manitoba and Alberta, such as abandoned gold mines, frozen lakes, or barren woods, which echo the places where the Erlking is said to reside and psychically connects to the deep recesses of the unconscious.

Both Rey and Mary Sibande embrace personas to delve into multilayered aspects of identity. Since 2007, through a body of work that includes sculpture and photographs, South Africa-based Sibande has cast herself as “Sophie,” a domestic servant dreaming of a life emancipated from slavery. With ever-closed eyes, Sophie imagines a world where she is part of society’s upper echelons; a post-colonial/post-apartheid interpretation of fairytales based on Western ideals. Such fantasies are made tangible through costuming—colour-fully luxurious hybrids of the traditional maid’s uniform and Victorian-era fashion taken to theatrical extremes. Sophie’s embodiment of multiple characters reflects her triumph over prejudice and the photographs are vivid explorations of the cultural, political, and socio-economic concerns of black African women. In many ways, Sophie is a manifestation of the artist’s personal history: three preceding generations of Sibande’s maternal family worked as domestic servants, making her the first to attain true freedom. In her recent work, Sophie emerges into a new chapter of her existence, shedding her apron as if readying for the ongoing battle that informs Sibande’s cultural identity.

The multiplicity of potential selves expressed through Sibande’s alter ego is also an aspect of Tomoko Sawada’s work, which addresses issues of social belonging through clothing and costume. For the series OMIAI♡ (2001), the Japanese artist was repeatedly photographed by a studio portraitist, each time in a similar formal pose, yet communicating distinct personalities through poise, hairstyle, and dress. The images are presented in card format, conforming to traditional Japanese “Omiai” pictures: studio portraits that parents have taken of their daughters when they reach a suitable age for marriage, which are then exchanged between families and friends in the hope of procuring a husband. In the 30 portraits that comprise OMIAI♡, the artist portrays herself wearing traditional kimonos, western-style dresses, and business suits. Despite these visual distinctions, a consistent eerie flatness runs across the series, resulting in a heightened sense of tension between outer appearance and inner life. Through Sawada’s replications of the “Omiai” photograph, she critiques its intention to communicate a woman’s identity strictly through her outward appearance.

David Favrod also explores his Japanese heritage in the photographic installation Gaijin (2009–13), in which he, like Sawada, Sibande, and McMaster, uses his own body and staging techniques to express cultural identity. Born in Japan to a Swiss father and Japanese mother, Favrod was raised in Switzerland. When he was denied dual citizen-ship by the Japanese Embassy, Favrod was inspired to create a series that fabricates his own personal Japan withinSwitzerland. “Gaijin” means foreign or alien in Japanese, a sensibility that he maintains by playing with visual clichés, embellishing the stories of others to his own ends, and emphasizing the fictional aspects of his childhood memories. Using an eclectic mix of costumes, masks, props, and altered landscapes, Favrod constructs personal narratives and visual testimony. He draws from fragmented tales his Japanese grandparents told of war and adversity, as in Ventdivin (2013), in which he dresses in army fatigues and wears a set of crudely-fashioned wings. Through Gaijin, Favrod communicates the paradox of his own identity as one caught between two cultures.

Fusing past and present with personal and social experiences, the works of these eight artists explore beguiling inter-connectivities that defy boundaries. Through the making of their photographs, they engage with a physical and material conception of self, highlighting how notions of identity are not fixed and always subject to shift and flux. The rituals people practice, objects they use, and clothing they wear are all subject to cross-pollination and cultural hybridization. Narratives, mythologies, and histories are constantly being re-shaped and performed by the self and the other within.

Curated by David Liss and Bonnie Rubenstein