I Am Not What I Am, I Become
Group Exhibition
Curated by Afia Bin Taleb
The exhibition began as an inward gesture, an attempt to approach the self without image, resemblance, or the comfort of clear definition. As the works took shape, this gesture unraveled into something more uncertain. What emerged was not a series of portraits, but a collective process of questioning: intimate, unresolved, and sometimes uncomfortable.
Across the works in I Am Not What I Am, I Become, the self is not presented as a fixed image; it appears instead through fragments, materials, gestures, and decisions. Some works carry traces of family and land; others speak to liberation, control, or resistance. Many hover between revelation and withholding. The artists are not documenting who they are, but continuously navigating how they arrive at themselves.
The process of making became the exhibition’s true ground. Each artist was tasked with an impossible feat: choosing what to reveal and what to protect, deciding which memories, forms, or materials could carry the weight of the personal without becoming illustrative. This tension between exposure and restraint runs through the exhibition. It is felt in surfaces that resist clarity, in narratives that remain partial, and in works that refuse easy interpretation.
At a time when artists are under constant pressure to produce, comment, and respond to broad themes and urgent issues, this exhibition insists on a pause. It asks what happens when that pressure is set aside, and attention turns inward. The works here do not attempt to speak for a collective condition. Instead, they reflect individual reckonings with roots, authorship, and the act of making itself.
There is discomfort in this inward turn. Looking within is not neutral. It raises questions of responsibility, vulnerability, and agency. Several works openly reveal this tension; others carry it quietly, embedded in material choices or spatial gestures. What unites the artists is not a shared aesthetic but a shared refusal to simplify the self for legibility.
I Am Not What I Am, I Become is not an exhibition of conclusions. It is a record of becoming, of artists allowing uncertainty, doubt, and self-questioning to shape the work. What the viewer encounters is not an end result, but a moment suspended in process: a series of acts that resist closure and insist on complexity, defiance, and honesty.
