Artist, Anna Ostoya: My name is Anna Ostoya. The work you are looking at it's called The Mixed Pseudomorphism of a True/False Cry. It is a morphed double portrait that is a photographic relief.
I juxtaposed two images. One of them comes from 1931. And it depicts a female face with a tear on her cheek. It is a portrait taken by the artist Germaine Krull. The other portrait comes from 1970. And it is a self-portrait of the artist Bas Jan Ader. It shows his face also with a tear on his cheek. I cut each of the portraits in half, creating two morphed portraits that look very much like masks.
By morphing the portrait of a woman with the portrait of a man, I wanted to point towards the gender issues. The question of identities, of course, is very much connected to gender, to meaning, to context. It's a constant negotiation of what's real, what's concrete, what's true and what's only constructed.
The works are about the question of authenticity and about the truth. Since these are artworks, the cry implies that it's enacted, not necessarily authentic. And there is no one answer to this question because, depending on a context as well as depending on time, the answer will be different.
I was interested in the affective power of these images. I'm pointing towards the question of how the images influence us, how they move us.