AILUJ PEARL. PERFORMANCE PORTRAITURE
Performance Portraiture examines the formation of the Self in relation to—and through—contemporary communication technologies. The work considers the ways digital infrastructures mediate identity, perception, representation, and self-recognition.
AILUJ, the artist’s moniker, emerges through an inversion of the selfie: a self-image constructed through filtering screens, projection, and algorithmic processes derived from the codes and operations of everyday digital infrastructures. The resulting portraits position technological mediation not as a secondary tool of representation, but as an active participant in the construction of the subject. The agency, struggle, and rejection (albeit unrealized in the popular visual lexicon) is a driving force throughout the series. The examination of how the female Self is constituted within value-structures that shape experience and development, as well as the conditions of through which existing occurs.
The work makes these aggravates perceptible, creating space for alternative forms of recognition and realization.
This series examines the shifting systems of value and recognition produced through social media, particularly the economies of visibility, approval, and “liking” that emerged from the 2010s onward. It attends to the frustrations embedded within these systems, where social participation becomes increasingly mediated through quantifiable forms of affirmation. To enter and examine this landscape of participation, the artist undertook a process of deprogramming—withdrawing from the dominant structures of engagement and developing contemplative practices that introduced alternative relationships to the ego, attention, and recognition. The resulting works consider what becomes possible when participation is approached outside the behavioral and perceptual frameworks prescribed by contemporary digital culture.
