Casting Transience

Visual artist and filmmaker Kiri Dalena exhibits a series of photographs titled Imprints: large-scale images of different people donning life masks, moulded from plaster. Enclosed by surroundings familiar and safe, they are all seemingly rested and at ease, despite the physical discomfort of being cast. All sit and gaze back at the viewer: waiting, questioning, and testifying. Whiteness bridges the silence between.

Dalena’s subjects are all dissident spirits: a network of individuals connected by ties either familial or comradely to the artist herself. Mostly belonging to a generation that has prevailed despite very interesting times, many of them led lives who were, and still are, very much intertwined with contemporary developments within Philippine culture and politics.

To train one’s lens on revealing their individual profiles, however, runs the risk of focusing on celebrity, on the cult of personality. Instead, Dalena chooses to represent them as masked portraits, remaining anonymous except to those keenly familiar with the contours of their faces and physique. What is essential, she seems to say, lies not in the act of recognizing the individual sitter, but in the process of connecting what ties their discrete presences to each other—and to ourselves as well.

In this exhibition, Dalena demonstrates the idea of photography as an imprint: a capturing or tracing of light, of form and of presence. This does not merely refer to the possibilities brought about by the mechanical and digital reproduction of images, but also embraces the capacity of technology to transmit and embody presences and affects far more elusive. The medium lends itself to interesting explorations this way, demonstrating how people as subjects are not only markers of vital categories such as ethnicity, class, or gender but also embodiments of personhood, which resists clean-cut taxonomies. What are their stories? The photographs are silent on this, and instead point to physical clues—the flowing dress, books strewn around in a corner, a potted plant—as silent artefacts that nonetheless elide probing queries.

Dalena furthermore delves into the use of the life mask as an imprint: from a fluid, viscous state, it settles and sets as a solid, immovable form. Plaster is usually treated as a transitional medium: meant to capture the impression used for making a mold or cast, to be discarded in the process of generating the final image. In her photographs, however, the material qualities of the plaster mold take on a central role: its flat façade of whiteness standing in sharp contrast against the vividly colored hues of her subjects and background, the spell of stiffness setting in and silencing all traces of talk, smiles, and gazes. Here, the white mask becomes evidence of, yet also erasure of, individuality: a signifier of dual states.  

Dual modes, indeed, persist throughout the series of images documented in Imprints: presence and anonymity, connectedness and individuality, memory and forgetting. It is in this sense that Dalena’s images can be read as introspections and quiet gestures against loss, departure and closure. Suspended in between the twin states of imprinting and revealing, Dalena’s photographs are remnants of cast stillness: a way of working against the tide of transience.

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