Confronting assumptions: questioning unidimensional stereotypes through portraits and personal effects

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1558756 (Table of Contents)

Confronting Assumptions is an interactive exhibition that engages both subjects and audience members in challenging their conscious and subconscious presumptions about others and, in turn, questioning how they choose to present their own identities. Our tendency to define individuals as unrealistically unidimensional is as unacknowledged as it is harmful. To counter this human inclination, this project calls upon a multidisciplinary framework that encompasses various fields from feminist theory to prejudice theory, and topics spanning from identity to visibility. The exhibition will be an interactive exercise where participants will attempt to match portraits of subjects with images of their personal effects in order to uncover the hidden biases within us all. The goal is not to shame or punish participants for recognizing internalized prejudices, but rather to start a dialogue within ourselves and our communities addressing culturally embedded discrimination, intolerance, injustice and identity. Ideally this exhibit will lead to further discussions and projects that encourage looking beyond reductionistic stereotypes and eliminating intolerance.