Abstract

The person in life that you will always be with the most, is yourself. Because even when you are with others, you are still with yourself! When you wake up in the morning, you’re with yourself, laying in bed, walking down the street in the sunlight or the rain, you’re with yourself. But who are you? What defines you?

Human development is not just governed by individual believes but also socio-cultural practices practiced by communities for survival and progress. Indigenous knowledge is an ocean; vast, deep & diverse beyond both White Supremacist and Brahminical practices. The transmission of indigenous knowledge is through both institutional and non-institutional means, the non-institutional means are often undocumented but still practiced.

The session explores the idea of how can we use our observation skills and mediums of expression to evoke a thought process and sense of awareness about each individual’s history and tracing it back to their life practices and choices. It is designed to be an initiation to document the practices that remain undocumented. It aims to connect the bridge between individual identity and socio-cultural identities through self-portraits. We hope that after the session, you’ll have a slightly different opinion about yourself.

The session will be divided into two parts:

To see

Self-portraits of various artists from around the globe and discuss the various aspects of the socio-cultural burden they were bearing with them

To do

Generate ideas and create self-portraits to understand ourselves more deeply.