Expo: Fragments of Being

What does the collage of your identity look like? Fragments of Being, curated by student-resident Lola Abbas, explores how young people draw on cultural influences to shape and express their identities. Their experiments with music, style, and creative expression are brought together in this exhibition. Discover their work through sound and vision!

Music and fashion serve as important means to express ourselves and find a sense of belonging with likeminded peers. But what does it mean to belong to a subculture today, when so much of our social and cultural life takes place online? How do we adopt and rework different influences to make something of our own? And how might we consider identity formation as a process of ‘sampling’ fragments of cultural sources – like a mosaic, or collage of identity? Is subculture, to put it bluntly, still alive?

Across four interactive workshops, participants from diverse backgrounds explored these questions through creative work, reflecting on how they shape and express their identities. The exhibition invites you to encounter their perspectives and discover how they bring fragments of different cultural influences together into their own curations of self. Their work as such offers a tangible contribution to the field of subcultural youth studies, rooted directly in young people’s own experiences and creative expressions.

Participants:

Curator Fragments of Being: