am a 23-year-old visual artist. My practice develops through various traditional mediums—etching, charcoal, oil painting, oil pastels, and watercolor—which I use to explore primarily two recurring themes: the self-portrait and the coffee pot. In my self-portraits, I investigate the face as a place of reflection and self-confrontation. I am deeply interested in the power that resides within emotions: their power to transform the gaze, to distort the perception of reality, to reveal unspoken content. In this context, I explore caricature as a means of expression: I accentuate and distort features and expressions to amplify internal tensions, conflicting moods, and nascent ideas. It is a work in which I combine self-analysis, irony, and observation of my body as a narrative surface. A central theme of my work is the modern conception of identity, as Western culture has developed it since the modern age: the idea of a stable, coherent, and autonomous individual. 2 However, as Zygmunt Bauman observes, in the era of "liquid modernity," identity is no longer a given, but an uncertain task: something we must constantly construct, modify, and perform. It has become fluid, unstable, subject to fragmentation and performance.