Expressing Multilayered Identity Through Art

Artist Célia Rakotondrainy explores how art can help us challenge our fixed images

“Technically, we are made of different elements that we have to make peace with, within our body. We are a whole made out of multiple pieces. But it does not work separately, you are not this or that: you are the entire thing.”

This is Célia Rakotondrainy. Through her series (de)construction, she challenges the fixed image that we human beings tend to have of our own and other people’s identities. Born in Paris in 1994, the French artist of Malagasy origin found herself confronted with her own multilayered identity after moving to Berlin in 2015. Moving through Europe highlighted her different “identities” and sparked her to explore the question of why and how she wanted to be identified: “I was oft reminded that I am not fully French nor fully Malagasy. Being far away from both of these countries was for me the catalyst in questioning my identity”

The self-portraits (see exhibit1) and other portraits of (de)construction are the result of a collaboration with photographer Marine Crénéguy, whose father comes from a family of travelers, more precisely fairground people.

“In the end, painting is a construction, photography is a construction, identity is a construction, and no one has to tell you how you have to identify yourself.”