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Is it possible to reinvent yourself retroactively? Annabel van Royen (1993) raised this provocative question with the work (Self)Portrait of a Young Girl (2019). Van Royen asked girls aged between 12 and 15 to pose for her; not in their own clothes, but in outfits the artist wore during her own youth. Once you know this, you are bound to look at these photographs from an entirely different perspective, and start to wonder at what point these models stopped being themselves and when the artist’s personal history took over. While the two obviously exist independently from each other, they are very much connected as they transform each other through time. By allowing the different layers to playfully intermingle, Van Royen appears to have reshaped the memories of her own adolescence.
In her new series, shown at Prospects and called Playtime (2024), Van Royen takes this approach a step further by combining similar ‘self’-portraits with childhood photographs she made at the time. For instance with photographs she took of herself with a webcam, or pictures of her hands together with those of her friends while forming a star – as if involved in a secret pact. By adding these photographs to the series, Van Royen’s own past seems to become even more entangled with the world of her models. She is thus not only exploring concepts like time and transformation, but also investigating the fluidity of identity. Van Royen: ‘I want to show how connections between generations are able to shift meaning and reshape perceptions.’
Text: Esther Darley
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)