Rules of Engagement explores ways of bringing attention to the mutual contingency of the self and the social through self-portraiture and signage. What we recognize as ourselves is deeply imbedded in the social institutions we exist within. Partly inspired by Judith Butler’s account of performative identity and self-poesis, I filmed myself performing many varying and contradictory ‘selves’, in an exploration of my own relationality and self-formation. These selves are all performing signs in order to communicate with others. By digitally compiling the footage, I composited myself into plural existence to disrupt the sense of singular coherence. The result is an agonistic portrait of my own socially situated self.

Freya Pitt has exhibited in galleries and completed permanent and ephemeral commissions in public and private space around Australia and internationally. Honed in her recently completed Master of Fine Arts at VCA (2018) Pitt’s research is focused on ways of bringing attention to the mutual contingency of the self and the social. Pitt has participated in the Melbourne Festival Art Trams Project, White Night Melbourne, Gertrude St Projection Festival and Skypetrait; transcontinental faces, a research project between Melbourne and Reutlingen University. Her work exists in a strange nexus between social theory, folklore, lumens, and silly costumes.