Imprints: Life Mask (Antonio Austria)

Life masks, plaster imprints of a living person’s facial features, were once popular in 19^th century Europe for the casting of bronze portraits of distinguished personages. In her photographic series, Imprints, Kiri Dalena uses white plaster casts to mediate our encounter with her famous subjects, artists and activists of an earlier generation who lived through interesting times and are intertwined with the history and development of contemporary art and politics in the Philippines. These portraits engage with the complex dualities of anonymity and celebrity, individuality and community, remembrance and forgetting, life and death.

In this series, Imprints implies an elusiveness, both in terms of the life mask’s expressionless surface that shields the true identity of the subject and the photograph’s inability to transmit the real presence and form of each individual. In the erasure of identity, physical details such as a wooden cane, a silver head of hair, a potted plant, or painting hanging on a wall allude to the stories that connect these people to us and to each other, and the quiet moments and tumultuous events that shaped their long lives.