What is a person? Is personality simply the assumption of a character, one that the individual plays throughout life, enacting one particular, though mostly subconscious, performative drama of being? It is a question that has raged down the halls of time as recorded in letters, one befitting the ancient presentiment that personhood is in fact based on a timeless and constant self-interrogation with the meaning and purpose of identity. Since its emergence in history, namely in a tale by Pliny the Elder, the earliest manifestation of portraiture as the drawn representation of human form goes hand-in-hand with the impetus to make art. The earliest civilizations intuitively knew that human identification is fundamentally a creative process in dialogue with immortality.

For her essay in the publication accompanying "Look at Me!: Portraits and Other Fictions" from the "la Caixa Contemporary Art Collection," curator Nimfa Bisbe Molin echoes the classic tale by Pliny the Elder, further exploring the act of preserving memory through portraiture and its contemporary transformations in the subjective and reflexive techniques and methods that advance a seamless proximity between the exhibiting artists and curious viewers who, for a passing experience in Pera Museum contribute to the increase in the public consciousness of that mutual enterprise of perpetual and mysterious self-creation that is natural to all who exist, while for some it is embraced more adaptably and with a better sense of humor than others.

What began as the anecdote of a Corinthian maid imagined by Pliny the Elder in the first century as she innocently outlined the shadow of her beloved to preserve his memory before he left for war has since imploded into an age defined by the myth of Narcissus. Addictively self-absorbing, the all-pervasive rise of social media has inflated the presence of every hyper-modernized individual into a virtual presence with a boundless reach, where all are swept in the capitalist zeitgeist, practically born to divulge in the almost god-like omnipresence of the fabricated and multifaceted avatars of themselves. For most, it is an automated reality, one fixed by the collective rush of groupthink as espoused by dystopian novelists, famously in the works of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, as they have spouted cautionary metaphors spotlighting the unsurpassable megalomania that is manifest as the identity crisis of post-industrial, technophilic humanity.

For the select few with the intelligence and determination enough to pierce the veil of machine-driven realism, the final frontier for the authentic expression of human identity beyond the irresistibly seductive confines of streamlined devices is, as ever, in deeply thoughtful and radically original art that strikes at the root of what it means to portray a person, as oneself and as another. In that spirit of inquiry, Molin drew from the unequalled, felicitous potency of the la Caixa Contemporary Art Collection based in Spain since 1985. Its over 1,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, video, film and installation by 389 artists spanning 37 countries are sleekly promoted under an umbrella organization that seeks to educate the greater public through international exhibitions that cultivate a universal appreciation of contemporary art.

In person, "Look at Me!" is challenging and uncanny, replete with enigmas that have the effect of making the human face transparent, a guise for the psychology of one historically, repressed creativity, that sourced in the invention of the self from the base of the imagination and into the mythopoetic spheres of collective fantasy. It is one of the unbearable, existential trials of modernity to fare the uniformity of identity, one long processed by the workaday factory laborers and bureaucratic cogs of the ministerial offices, the service and extractive industries of the city and country respectively that mine the human head to an eerie emptiness. In typical fashion, the artist is condemned to merely reflect the growing pains of civilization from within, introspectively exhuming the soul of renewable inspiration from the perishable body of forms.

On the top two gallery floors at Pera, the exhibition follows four themes: Masks and Other Fictions, The Memory of the Face, Spotlight on Emotion, Conventions of Identity. In the usual manner of the utterly transient first impressions that plague the more thoroughly enduring respect demanded by most contemporary art, the series of portraits by Gillian Wearing under the title, "Album" is as opaque in its underlying content as the often unreadable, overcomplicated prose that characterizes much of critical writing on new art. From the years of 2003 to 2006, the artist assumed the physical identity of her younger self, along with her entire nuclear family. Freakishly unsettling, though breathtakingly admirable in terms of the unbelievable degree of calculated effort, skill and concept involved, one of the pieces reincarnates her brother candidly from his room, as entirely excavated from a freeze-frame of her personal past, where he stands in stained sweatpants, combing his long, brittle hair with an indifferent, pasty stare. A closer look shows the overlap where her skin is slightly visible behind the skin-tight masks and artificial integuments of her kin. It is an example of realism to the extreme, and all to deliver the point in brilliantly heightened visuals that she lives in all of them, however unglamorously.

The 1983 masterpiece, "Beast" by Jean-Michel Basquiat makes a welcome appearance, adding to the tremendous international profile of the exhibition, and of la Caixa, as a forerunner in the world of contemporary art for all. Through his peerless gift as a Neo-Expressionist who made waves under the wings of Warhol in the downtown New York of the dying decade, "Beast" gravitates with the epitome that was Basquiat in the public eye, a young black man sensitive to the categorical African primitivism forced down his throat and that of his fellow persons of color by the institutional and rhetorical racism of the politicized, American cultural establishment. Spotlight on Emotion covers an analogous social range, with its grandest piece by Pedro Mora portraying the proud visage of Amber Smoot, an Afro-Japanese teenager from New York made with cold ceramic in 1998 and titled after her name. It is not a secret that race plays a central role in the manufacturing of identity, especially considering the impositions of the globalized postcolonial political infrastructure where the peoples of most nations are defined from within and externally according to ethnic social boundaries.

There are some thirty pieces on display for "Look at Me!" to chronicle the depths of self-consciousness through an experiential concourse in which seers may focus and uncover an inner reflection of themselves, one born of the impetus that once inspired a fictive, ancient Roman maid to sketch the first portrait in history. One of the more participatory pieces is "The Milk Wood" by Curro González from 1999, a sprawling 535 cm-wide oil on canvas hung across one of the more expansive walls on the topmost gallery floor at Pera, surrounded by an abundantly spacious visual field through which the enthused and intrepid of Istanbul's urbane float to gain perspective in the spiritual refuge that lives in spaces dedicated to pure artistry. Paired with a laminated placard to reveal the hidden portraits within its dense, sylvan landscape, such literary muses and intellectual luminaries as the poet William Carlos Williams, the composer Duke Ellington, and the surrealist Paul Klee are only apparent to the more searching eyes given to finding those fabled and unknowable, metaphysical places where the world opens unseen portals that lead through to the heart of becoming, toward the higher self that moves in concert with the sustained metamorphoses of creation.