The project emerged from a shared interest in identity as something unstable, relational, and difficult to fix. Rather than searching for similarities between ourselves, we chose to acknowledge difference as a starting point. Photography became a common medium through which each participant could respond to their own sense of identity, often through relationships, environments, and people closest to them.
From one possible reading, identity here does not appear as something that exists purely from within. It is shaped through an external gaze. To recognise ourselves, we require reflection: a mirror, another person, someone who looks back. Without this encounter, identity remains incomplete.
Within this installation, images do not function as evidence or documentation of who someone “is.” Removed from personal context and presented collectively, the photographs invite interpretation rather than certainty. They encourage viewers to project, compare, and question their own assumptions about identity and belonging.
This way of thinking connects to broader artistic practices that explore identity as something constructed through representation and perception. Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills revealed identity as a set of external scripts rather than an inner essence. Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas similarly demonstrates how presence and identity are shaped through the direction of gazes, existing in the space between the subject and the viewer.
Displayed within a public, everyday environment, Shared Identity becomes a field of mutual reflections. The work does not propose a single shared narrative. Instead, it raises a quieter question: do these images genuinely connect us, or do they create an illusion of commonality formed in the act of looking?
Meaning emerges not from the photographs alone, but from the relationship between the images, the space, and those who encounter them.