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The Fragmentation of Identity: Reconstructing the Familiar in Portrait

The Fragmentation of Identity: Reconstructing the Familiar in Portrait

For our pop-up exhibition at Café Conrad in Amsterdam, we wanted to create a small interactive work: Something playful that visitors could take home, yet still connected to the core ideas behind the show. The piece transformed the human face, your face, into a site of distortion and reconstruction. In real time, the camera dissected and rearranged each portrait, generating uncanny identities that felt recognisable yet undeniably wrong.

In a moment defined by filters, AI, and constant self-curation, these fractured portraits reveal the seams we usually work so hard to hide. Each distorted face becomes a reminder of our own carefully managed online identities, exposing the tension between authenticity and artifice, between reality and reconstruction.

Printed on thermal receipt paper, the output was limited to only black and white: a visual constraint that reflects how rarely anything in life fits into such binaries. The medium’s disposability was intentional: receipts are designed to be thrown away, forgotten. And yet, as with most images of ourselves, we tend to personify them. Even a distorted likeness can end up kept on a shelf, tucked in a book, or left on a desk waiting to be seen again. One man’s trash really is that same man’s treasure.

As we were clearing up the exhibition, a glitch caused the printer to run the portraits again, producing duplicates. These accidental reprints became our treasure.

By scanning the receipts back into the computer, the fragments began a second life. These small, temporary prints turned into the building blocks for something more permanent: new portraits, new paintings, new possibilities. What began as playful distortion has become the foundation for a growing body of work exploring how identity is broken apart and how it can be reassembled into something entirely new.