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Self-portrait (2024)

Single-channel video, 4’54
16:9 / HD digital file / color / stereo - 8 channels

<sub>Special mention, Ibrida Festival 2024

Biblioteca Pública Héctor González Mejía, Intermediaciones, Medellín, Colombia 2024
Teatro Municipal Baltazar Dias, Image Play, Funchal, Portugal 2024
Grosso Modo Gallery, Resonance, Tel-Aviv, Israel 2024
Pátio da Inquisição, Fonlad, Coimbra, Portugal 2024
Fabbrica Delle Candele, Ibrida, Forlì, Italy 2024
Goethe-Institut, ArteScienza, Rome, Italy 2024</sub>

_{NYLAAT House, Experimental Loop, NYC, USA 2024
Goes :art Channel TV, On Screen, Online 2024
The Wrong Biennale, Television, Online 2024}

_{Alys Beach, Digital Graffiti, USA 2024}

_{Il Piccolo, MA/IN, Matera, Italy 2024}

_{UNAM of Morelia, Pupila, Mexico 2024}

“ Self-portrait simply perpetuates the human obsession with finding his double through the question of representation. The latter is a moving, carnal body, and therefore opposed to the flat surface onto which it is projected. The work maintains this inability of representation to seize even its own reflection. The body is worked here as a flat plane of flesh. By eradicating most of its form and space, it is reduced to its matter qualities in a unilateral falling movement.

The main material of the work was obtained in a darkroom, by crushing my own body with a scanner. The artwork is a report with the task of exploring my flesh, of taking an overview of my body at a given moment. It's an evaluation of the fragility of this material, so complexing and foreign when it wants to be, that gives the cruel impression of living in someone else. More than a plastic work, it's the necessity of an anatomical self-fiction. “

“ Valentin Sismann's autoportrait sits in a long line of artist's self portraits that incorporate their signature tools and material processes to re- imagine both the portrait and the self. Composed of close field scans of his own body, ultrasound images and overlaid with image registration data, this slowly panning work evades a simple reading, instead posing the idea that the self is a composite of elements, some close and familiar, some abstract and seen through a technocratic lens. In this slowly evolving work the shapes and forms of the body are glimpsed, only to dissolve in a an unstable field of increasingly chaotic overlays and partial representations. Proposing an "image of the self" which accords with the late contemporary idea of the multiple as a claim to shifting and varied identities or personas that inhabit us all, this work makes plain the elusive. fragmented and possibly contradictory nature of the many «selves» that we operate through. “

^{Curator's Note – Digital Graffiti, 2024}