“Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers… He’s making sure your attention is always filled. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.”
— Chuck Palahniuk
Axis Mundi is an exploration on hyper individualism, the effects of social media, and the commodification of beauty in the digital age. We have become the product, and our online lives are part of the attention economy. Selfies are everywhere, but how much truth do they hold? Beauty enhancing filters, default camera processing on smartphones, altered by AI apps like Facetune. Never before have our own faces become so visible, to others and ourselves, nor so heavily edited and manipulated through this performative display. Humans weren’t designed to see our faces so much. We weren’t meant to be constantly scrutinising all our ‘flaws’.
In making ourselves an offering on the altar of social media we present ourselves for examination. For many, this means presenting only a highlight reel of experiences, a polished version of our reality. There are countless new apps to hide these perceived flaws in our person. With the rise of technology, AI, apps, and beauty filters what is real is brought into question. We are rewarded online for posting thirst traps, selfies, and images that uphold the male gaze and/or our status. The validation, likes, comments and ‘engagement’ is in itself intangible and empty, offering no real solace or nourishment. This cycle of validation addiction is reinforced as we seek to create our optimised selves. Creating a co-dependent feedback loop on an infinite scroll. We offer ourselves willingly to the algorithm, modifying our behaviour to suit its desires, fantasies, demands. The algorithms that are literally changing the way we see, are perceived, our neural pathways.
My works explore self-portraiture in ways that subvert expectations and create a dialogue with the viewer on what is image making, its impact, and being a witness to the process. Axis Mundi is a peek behind the curtains into the creation of selfies and our online image. All taken on my iPhone 13 Pro, in a dark room, at night, illuminated only by the glowing screen of the phone. The captured images remain unmodified apart from simple tonal adjustments. In this way they speak to traditional photographic practice in capturing and producing an image, using only interactions of light with photosensitive materials. However, in this case the computational algorithms that are built into modern phone cameras have amplified and distorted the capture into something barely recognisable.This creates the antithesis to the idealised selfie – generating unexpected glitches, artefacts, noise, and distortion.
These selfies play on entrenched archetypes of femininity – monstrous feminine, Maiden, Madonna-Mistress complex. Taking these photos, myself, I am limited to poses I can create with a camera in one hand and finger position able to press the button. How much can you bend, move, adapt, and contort the self to acquire the perfect image? Tripping over in the dark or hurting my back to get the shot – nothing compared to those who’ve lost their lives taking the ‘perfect’ selfie. More lethal than sharks apparently.
Yasemin Sabuncu is the recipient of the SALA Solo Photographic Art Prize in collaboration with Praxis Artspace, ATKINS, and Centre for Creative Photography.
Yasemin Sabuncu is also a finalist in the SALA festival 2024 Don Dunstan Foundation Award.
Artist Talk with Yasemin Sabuncu on Sat 31st Aug 2024, 2:00 pm – Click here to RSVP
