CAN I EXIST WITHOUT TRYING TO EXPLAIN MYSELF

There Are Parts of Me You Will Never Meet.

KAFANI

EDITION
I have spent so much of my life wanting to be understood. There is a particular discomfort in being misunderstood, the almost instinctive desire to reach into another person’s mind and rearrange their perception of you. No, that isn’t what I meant. That isn’t why I did it. That isn’t who I am. So I learned to explain. I explained my choices, my intentions, my silences, my contradictions. I tried to leave as little room as possible between who I knew myself to be and who someone else might imagine me to be. Yet, no one will ever know every version of me. There is a child inside my history that only a handful of people remember. There are versions of me that existed for years and others that existed only long enough to teach me something. There are memories I rarely visit, thoughts I have never spoken aloud, dreams still too delicate to be shared, and parts of myself I have not even met yet. Even those who love me most will only ever know me in fragments. And I will know them in fragments too. There is something strangely beautiful about that. There Are Parts of Me You Will Never Meet is my surrender to the unknowability of another human being, and to my own. You may misunderstand me. You may remember me differently than I remember myself. You may construct an entire version of me inside your mind that I will never recognize. But freedom for me is, knowing that I do not have to make all of myself visible in order for all of me to be real.

A little behind the artist mind.

In There Are Parts of Me You Will Never Meet, I explore the idea that no human being can ever be fully known. The person in the frame existed before the viewer arrived, and she continues to exist beyond the moment in which she is seen. What I allow you to see is only a fraction of her, a single moment from a life made up of memories, contradictions, former selves, private thoughts, forgotten dreams, and versions of herself that may no longer exist. I wanted to question our instinct to believe that seeing someone means having access to them. A portrait can preserve a face, a gesture, a body, a moment in time. But it can never contain an entire person. I think about all the versions of ourselves that exist beyond our reach. There are versions of me that now live only in someone else’s memory. Versions that belonged to places I have left behind. There are things I once loved that no longer move me, dreams I once carried so closely that I thought they would define my life, and parts of myself I have changed so completely that I sometimes struggle to recognise the person I once was. And then there are the selves I have not met yet. That thought became important to me while creating this piece. The title, There Are Parts of Me You Will Never Meet, sounds almost like a confession, but I wanted the “me” to remain ambiguous. Is it the person in the frame? Is it me, the artist? Is it someone I used to be? Or someone I am still becoming? Perhaps it is all of them. There is something liberating to me about accepting that ambiguity. Note- Feel free to reach out to me so we discuss the entirety of this piece if you wish.

FAQ

Chain
Ethereum
Contract
0x4d04···8d91
Type
ERC1155TL
MetadataIPFS
MediaJPEG