Malcolm Payne

Abandon Your Identity was originally displayed in the Interview Block on Robben Island, as part of the ‘Thirty Minutes’ exhibition. During the time of its use as a prison, the Interview Block was the space of communication where the prisoners, isolated on an island, came face-to-face with the ‘normal’ world. It was a space and time in which reconstructed and abandoned identities collided. In meeting friends and family, the prisoner’s ‘outside’ identity was recalled and triggered by the presence of the visitor. The visitor, on the other hand, had to face the prisoner whose identity had been reconstructed by the environment of the prison. The video shows a blackened glass through which a performer attempts to scratch or draw a picture of himself. As the portrait develops, a point is reached where the image becomes less and disappears as more is drawn. The prisoner, searching for an image of himself, is doomed to see his identity disappear. This defacement is a visual equivalent of the tensions present in the prisoner’s sense of himself. The performer eventually realizes that he is able to glimpse something beyond the glass. He loses sight of himself and eventually continues to clean away the remnants of the scratched face. He reveals his face to us, but doesn’t notice that we are looking at him.