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The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders both past and present.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that this website contains images of deceased persons.

doppelgänger

Previous exhibition
from Friday 23 October 2009 until Friday 23 April 2010

doppelgänger is the second in a series of virtual exhibitions held by the National Portrait Gallery that explore contemporary notions of portraiture in the online environment. Based in Second Life the exhibition will feature the work of five artists interested in exploring the concepts of constructed self, identity, truth and illusion in the digital realm.

Gazira Babeli
Gazira Babeli

doppelgänger is the second in a series of virtual exhibitions held by the National Portrait Gallery that explore contemporary notions of portraiture in the online realm. Based in Second Life the exhibition features the work of five artists interested in exploring the concepts of constructed self, beauty and likeness, truth and illusion in self representation.

At the heart of the exhibition is the, often fearful, societal fascination with the ideas of twinning, cloning and the concept of the other self. The participating artists from Australia, Italy, USA and China have analysed notions of portraiture and identity in their works that exploit the unique qualities presented by the Second Life environment.

The exhibition will run from 23 October 2009 to 23 April 2010 on the purpose-built Portrait Island within Second Life.  Multimedia interpretations of these works are also available for viewing in exhibition spaces at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

Second Life

Second Life is a freely downloadable 3D environment on the Internet and is based on a familiar human dream of living another life.  By creating an avatar, a 3D digital version of yourself, you can take on the appearance of a new person; a different sex, a different age or even an anthropomorphic figure.  Once you have built your avatar you can walk, fly or teleport to islands created by other users and use text or voice chat to communicate with the more than 60,000 'residents' (real people from all over the world) who are online at any given time.

5 portraits

1 Cao Fei. 2 Andrew Burrell. 3 Patrick Lichty. 4 Adam Nash, Christopher Dodds, Justin Clemens.

Related people

Gillian Raymond (curator)

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The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders past and present. We respectfully advise that this site includes works by, images of, names of, voices of and references to deceased people.

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