Mirror Armor
Being entrapped in narcissism is like a “self-jail”. Placing the mirror armor fixtures over my nude body causes the viewer to see the pixelated and fragmented image of myself. Usually covering, hiding, pretending to be a version of myself on the outside, therefore, “good looking” seems more of decoration or in itself a type of armor suitable for public viewing. Will these mirrors of self reflection cause me to wonder who I am on a deeper level? To discover who I truly am, what I am afraid of, why I waste my life without discovering my inner self. I constantly struggle with how I can break this boundary because I want to wake from this oblivion.

Paranoid Panopticum

Entering The Paranoid Panopticum you will run across your own fixation on control. While you will be able to control the visual by mirror and video- projection, a shift in the perception of reality takes place. Controlling changes into fear of being controlled, maximizing control becomes its own threat. In the Paranoid Panopticum you are haunted by your own mirrored projections. You can play with your own projection in a paradox based on the myth of Echo, Narcissus and his mirrored image. At the moment where Narcissus commits suicide, the mirrored image of the visitor is ‘suicided’. At this point the story starts over again.

Kiss Me

You hold a small mirror to your nose, like a pair of glasses, while kissing someone. You look into your own eyes, but kiss someone else’s lips.
Despite the world being connected through an intricate network of fiberglass, more than ever we seem to be alone together. ‘Kiss Me’ brings these two opposing forces – unbridled narcissim on the one hand and a deep longing for connection on the other -together in one object through reinvention of an age-old instrument: the mirror.

Захаров, Вадим Арисович
danaë installation
Drawing from the perpetually revisited myth of Zeus and Danae, an installation by Vadim Zakharov in the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2013 used consumable objects and the sequence of architectural spaces to make manifest underlying ideas about ‘rudeness, lust, narcissism, demagoguery, falsehood, banality, and greed, cynicism, robbery, speculation, wastefulness, gluttony, seduction, envy, and stupidity.’ the impregation of danae occurs when zeus appears to her as a golden shower after she is locked in a tower to prevent the professed death of her father. gender dynamics and the poetic cycle of gestation are reconstructed spatially with a total use of the pavilion– a first in the history of the building.

The Collector
Born in Parkersburg, West Virginia and raised in Houston, Texas, Rachel Lee Hovnanian is a New York-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores contemporary notions of narcissism, obsession and intimacy, and society’s alienating addiction to modern technological advances and media.

Disconnect

Female narcissism obviously is a misogynistic concept. “Being a feminist is about defeating, fighting those ideas. But actually, what a lot of gender studies has been about is looking into what’s masculine, figuring out what masculinity is, and how to conform to it maybe. Feminism’s ideal is a middle class white butch. ‘Don’t do feminine things.’ This excludes so many ethnicities, and models of femininity,” says Uddenberg. Her sculptures currently on view at the 9th Berlin Biennale explicitly do not follow this doctrine. Their stylized bodies are caricatures of what a “woman” “looks like,” yet their hyper-femme physique, positioning and accessories capture something about the way we look at ourselves. They are both object and subject. They turn you on, yet they repulse you. Their agency is palpable, but their intentions are intangible. “I’m also very alienated from femininity,” says Uddenberg.

My Gallerist Made Me Do It
Ed Young is the bad boy of SA art, the agent provocateur, the iconoclast, the master of subversion. His instincts are to epater la bourgeoisie, defy political correctness and flout cant, shibboleths and taboos, thus exposing the conservatism of art lovers of every age and generation. The cult of his own personality and fabrication of a personal mythology involves lengthy bouts of narcissistic exhibitionism and self-exposure.

Your big face
Your Big Face is an interactive projection installation. Using a live camera feed, participants’ faces are projected onto the canvas of a giant polygonal 3D face. This combination of the organic and polygon raises questions about the digital representation of self, modern attention spans, and the narcissistic and voyeuristic qualities of modern culture. It is also just really fun.

Paranoid Panopticum

The viewer activates the «Paranoid Panopticum» by entering its small corridor between two «walls». Recorded through the mirrored wall by a video camera, the viewer’s image is projected onto the opposite wall, where it becomes part of a story freely adapted by Alfred Kreijemborg in his play titled «An Echo Play» (1923), based on the Greek myth of Narcissus. Instead of returning the affections of the nymph Echo, the protagonist falls in love with his own reflection. Like with the image of Narcissus on the water, the viewer’s own reflection appears now – and the viewer observes only himself. The Panopticum, the terminus of a circulatory prison complex, is controlled from a watchtower not visible for the prison inmates. Having consciousness controlled here causes in effect the self-control among the prisoners. The paradox in this experience – control and society’s surrendering to its own mechanisms – forms the basis of Maat’s installation. Whether as the observer or observed, the viewer is consistently extradited to the panoptic omnipresence of his own all-pervading reflection.

Glass Narcissus