Performed Imaginaries

Series2 Episodes

Docent Original

Performed Imaginaries

Imagine the self as a rehearsal—each gesture a trial, each appearance a shifting draft. Through blurred figures, hybrid personas, and narrative ambiguity, these artists reveal identity as something continually shaped by perception and context. In Performed Imaginaries, the self emerges not as a fixed truth but as an ever-changing performance, fluid, uncertain, and always in the process of becoming.

Start Series

Performed Imaginaries examines selfhood as something constructed, enacted, and constantly reshaped. In a world where identity shifts across cultural, gendered, and digital contexts, the self becomes a fluid performance—emerging, adapting, and refracted through the very surfaces that mediate how we are seen.

Performed Imaginaries explores identity as something continually shaped by shifting contexts and the mediated ways we see ourselves. Figures appear in states of partial visibility—blurred, fragmented, and unsettled—suggesting a selfhood filtered through layers of perceptual noise. What seems stable is gently disrupted by veils of texture and subtle interference, echoing the distortions that frame contemporary experience.

Rather than fixed portraits, these works offer fleeting presences, always forming and dissolving. Performed Imaginaries invites us to view the self as an ongoing performance—mutable, negotiated, and forever in the process of becoming.

Episodes

Individual artist spotlights examining how their practice relates to the series theme.

Free Plan

Episode 1Kayode OjoOjo turns consumer glamour into a lived aesthetic practice, where desire, staging, and self-fashioning merge into a sharp, seductive language for crafting identity and presence.

Free Plan

Episode 2Preslav KostovKostov’s paintings trace bodies caught in perceptual noise, forms emerging and dissolving within the shifting surfaces that shape how we see and imagine ourselves.

Featured Artists

Visit the artists' profiles directly to learn more.

ArtistKayode Ojo1990, American

ArtistPreslav Kostov1998, Bulgarian

Want full access to every episode?

Watch the series and unlock premium episodes, art advisory, and exclusive events with membership.

Become a Member

Other Series

Explore our other series to discover more unique curations.

Sunlight & Solitude

Sunlight & Solitude brings together works that hold summer in luminous suspension — figures drifting through radiant seas, portraits alive with heat and immediacy, and abstractions that blur like haze. Each piece becomes a meditation on light as memory, presence, and reflection.

6 Episodes

Fractured self

Imagine yourself as a mosaic - each shard a memory, each fragment a story. Identity is fragmented, nonlinear, imperfect. Through collage, artists reassemble past and present into visual diaries, embracing the messiness of memory to reveal a self that is ever-evolving, resilient, and beautifully incomplete.

16 Episodes

Mourning and Melancholia

Art has the unique ability to externalize trauma, transforming invisible emotional wounds into tangible visual forms. This chapter explores how artists make personal and collective grief visible, turning pain into a shared experience and fostering empathy through creative expression.

9 Episodes

Make your Life a Work of Art

Art can intertwine with a life so completely that it becomes a way of seeing, feeling, and remembering. This chapter explores artists whose work grows from personal history, beauty, and art-historical resonance, revealing how they transform lived experience into distinct visual languages that illuminate the profound connection between life and creation.

1 Episodes

Collective Selves

Identity unfolds as a shared terrain, shaped by intertwined memories, layered histories, and the environmental concerns that bind communities together. In online gatherings, artists weave these traces into shifting constellations that blur the boundary between self and collective. Through such communal making, identity becomes fluid—co-created, responsive to our changing world, and continually reshaped by the many who remember and care in common.

1 Episodes

Expanded Bodies

Bodies become porous in this series—stretching across materials, technologies, and shared environments. Expanded Bodies explores how embodiment is constantly reconfigured through movement, connection, and transformation, revealing the self as an evolving field rather than a contained form

3 Episodes