Spectral Self-Portrait, Thanks to Derrida

Spectral Self-Portrait, Thanks to Derrida, 2014.

Inkjet print on gallery gloss, 42cm x 59.4cm.

Who am I? How do I understand my fractured and shifting sense of selfhood? Spectral Self-Portrait takes up Jacque Derrida's notion of hauntology, which uses the figure of the spectre, or the ghost, to deconstruct the surety of ontology, the metaphysics of being, existence and reality. The ghost is an uncertain and ethereal figure that contests binaries of being/becoming, presence/absence and past/future. A hauntological approach to identity and selfhood reveals that how I understand myself in the present is always informed by past memories of personal experience, which are at the same time future visions of my-self. On the one hand, my sense of self is stretched across time and space, a changing and evolving dialogue of being and becoming and becoming-undone. On the other hand, past and future selves collapse in the present, deferring a sense of a fixed and unified identity, and unsettling selfhood. 

To convey this sense visually, I draw on the techniques of fin de siecle spirit photography, which used multiple exposure to capture apparitions, ghosts and the spectral world. While spirit photographers falsely represented the ghosts of others, I use the technique of multiple exposure to depict my own ghosts, my own self deferred from and to the past and future. The setting is also liminal space, referencing how hauntology affects the surety of history and landscape as well. This stairwell used to be the grand staircase of a nineteenth century department store located in Newtown, Sydney. It is now a fire escape, the last vestige of a grand building converted to twenty-first century uses. Once peopled by shoppers and their social interactions, this is now a 'haunted' space of human absence. Spectral self and haunted space are co-constituted in this image.