Make it stand out.

Ours is a culture that prefers to make our identities static and confine them to categories, often diametrically

opposed to one another, with specific stereotypes attached to each. And yet what is a human being if not a locus

of exceptions, a complex cluster of contradictions, coexisting and in perpetual flux?

Susan Sontag The Complete Rolling Stone Interview 2013 Yale University Press

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simon Weill First and Last Notebooks Oxford University Press 1970

Blessed is the knower of secrets: no two minds are alike, just as no two faces are alike.

Babylonian Talmud, Berachott 58a

As a lived experience, meaningful art-making has the capacity to illuminate the expansive complexity of pluralism and identity. Through the arts, we can engage in a rich discourse that poses thoughtful questions and proposes artful responses regarding our personal and communal, social, political and historical memory. As a fluid mode of expressivity, the arts can also illuminate the notion of ‘identity’ as fluid - that personal identity evolves from a mindset formed early in life and continues to be shaped over time,

via one’s cultural, religious and historical narratives. As we develop art skills and engage in artful dialogues, our mindsets evolve; this moves us towards an understanding that Pluralism is indeed an active, energetic engagement with identity. Thus, vibrant images, songs, dances and spoken words can transform our mindsets and lead us to embrace pluralism as an essential, living value. The transformative power of the arts lies in their capacity to interconnect us and illuminate our shared commonalities and complex differences.

As I See Myself, As I See You is a series of four intergenerational workshops with a primary focus on dialogue inspired by the art of the photographic portrait. Designed as a rich conversation on inter-generational identity, these sessions also explore fundamental photographic themes as well as basic digital camera technologies and their visual impact on the image. Artists are encouraged to 'turn their eyes both inwards towards the self and outwards towards one’s partner'. The images created naturally evolve into a personal record of one’s self and one’s partner as seen, experienced and revealed. In the deepest sense, each image is an expression of what one feels about individual and shared identity, in all of its splendid complexity.