Fates, faces, temperaments: people who use the most subtle means to fight the harshest fates. They ward off storms with a straw.
They avail themselves of all the possibilities of existence, space and time, with profound wisdom and exhilaration, with lightness.
The diversity of cultural experiences and practices also leads to diversity in visuality. I examine the forms that have emerged in the course of historical development in different regions of the world, through the encounter, mixture and exchange of cultures.
Wherever a society is modernizing, portraiture also undergoes modernization. That is because modernization, modernity, modern society are global phenomena, and are not exclusive to Europe. Examining the similarities of cultures, their differences and distances cannot be limited to interpreting the modernities of non-Western societies in the light of Western modernity. I consider it my task to trace and study the changes in visual language based on the findings of the social and cultural sciences. I seek to capture modern society globally, regionally and locally.
However sudden, dramatic or radical, the course of modernization cannot immediately change the entirety of the cultural, artistic and religious traditions of portraiture. And although these phenomena, forms of knowledge and concepts are themselves constantly changing, they are adapting to a set of globally prevailing ideas and practices. These forms of knowledge represent the historical continuity to which the ideas and practices of modernity must adapt. Modernization overwrites or rewrites the differences between societies, the traditions: put differently, the old differences give rise to new differences.
For an example, take the medieval, tripartite concept of society, in which it comprises of three orders: the oratores, the bellatores, and the laboratores—those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. The priesthood prayed for the lay people, and the lay people defended the priesthood. In this case, it is quite clear that the moral order is more than just a set of norms. An exchange of ideas, reaching a common understanding whenever possible. With all the pomp, ritual and imagery of hierarchic complementarity.