- Venue
- Sprout Community Arts
- Starts
- Tuesday, May 17, 2011
- Ends
- Saturday, May 28, 2011
- Address
- 74 Moyser Road SW16 6SQ
- Location
- London
At the end of last year, the artist Maru Rojas was commissioned by the Wandsworth Arts Team to develop a project that explored our understanding of diversity and ethnicity, particularly in relationship to those “tick the box” categories that have become so common these days. From October to April the artist had an exchange with a group of residents from the borough and created several works in response to this interchange. What seeps through the works is that our collective imaginary and public identity is so fixed in ourselves that it is perhaps difficult, if not impossible, to imagine ourselves outside of the box – our identity immanently fixed to presupposed categories. The question arises then – can we free ourselves from the social structures and power relation- ships that force individuals to define themselves within these boundaries in the first place? Can we re-imagine ourselves when we are restrained by our own public image? Beyond the obvious interpretation of public identity as something that we use to hide our private selves, the artist wants to find out if identity is the ability to conceal yourself rather than expose or talk about yourself? Is it the right to own a secret, a private identity, what makes up who we are?
