Ana María Caballero delivers a multifaceted rendition of self in the performative poem Waiting Room (2024). Tying into her own strong spoken-word history and poetry’s tradition of orality, Caballero performs her verse on screen, using her own body to speak the language of the poem for the first time. Her text’s narrative twists with the vicissitudes of caretaking. The intersecting Spanish, translating to “You, Me, Ours”, is a play on words that shifts the speaker's intent. The formal division in Waiting Room prompts us to question the permeable boundaries between caring for ourselves and caring for others. Waiting Room is from Caballero’s prize-winning, forthcoming book Mammal. The collector will receive a signed print of the poem.

Elsewhere, Melissa Wiederrecht’s two self-portraits provide an insight into her individual experience as a Muslim woman. Composed using AI, generative textures, and Photoshop, these works showcase manifold aspects of self, via figurative and abstract imagery. In colourful bursts that vibrate with the artist’s trademark mesmerising graphics, the artist confronts themes, including Western prejudices surrounding religious belief, and existing as a woman within the art world.

Caballero and Wiederrecht’s debut collaborative piece Miss Metaverse (2024) uses the beauty pageant concept and rhetoric commentary to grapple with what “self” means living as an artist in the world of Web3. Presented as a selection of some 50 generative artworks, each iteration reveals a new correlation of words, strung together in response to prompts that reflect and satirise the spectacle of these competitions. Harnessing a camera to interact with the audience, Miss Metaverse pulls the image of the viewer into the pictorial plane and, in a sense, onto the stage.