Descartes

  • Descartes,  Israel Museum,  Kimiko Yoshida

    Self-portraits, brides of the world, and Descartes

    Through a series of self-portraits taken during the last seven years, the Japanese photographer Kimiko Yoshida embodies the brides of the world. Subverting the stereotypes which pertain to tribal minorities and segregation, she challenges the search of narcissism: she seeks erasure: erasure of the origins. Borrowing from the precept of Descartes “Larvatus Prodeo”(`I come forward masked’), and like an Ovidian tale, transforms into an African, an Indian, an Egyptian, a Russian, a Tibetan… alluding to the condition that we live in the globalization of goods and images, exceeding the possession of a fixed identity by mixing cultures, religions, rituals and references. She crossbreeds, she hybrids, she metamorphoses. Her approach is…