A persona is a mold before it is a mask. Curated by Barbara Horvath at THE HALL of PART International Art Residency Austria in Vienna, persona. fragments of identity gathers Odie Lap Chun Chow, Edith Karlson, Jakob Lena Knebl, Yein Lee and Paulina Semkowicz around one line from Ingmar Bergman, and the self turns out to be a run of imperfect casts.
In Bergman’s Persona (1966), the nurse Alma tells Elisabet, an actress who has stopped speaking, “I think I could turn into you if I really tried.” The line gave the exhibition its title. It sounds like love and works like a technique. Jorge Luis Borges wrote the counter-spell, a fable of mirror creatures sentenced to repeat every human gesture until, beginning with the Fish, they wake: “gradually they will no longer imitate us.” Imitation as longing; imitation as captivity.
Horvath sets that prophecy beside Edith Karlson’s sirens, which in her account turn the myth around: human bodies, fish heads. Read this way, the siren is less a fixed figure than a border between species, there to be redrawn, and Karlson redraws it. Through Borges, the inversion gains an edge. The fish head is not a disguise but the first feature to stop imitating, the part of the body that woke before the rest.
Horvath also describes self-portraits that people from different backgrounds have modeled from Estonian clay in Karlson’s studio since 2020. The exhibition text puts it exactly: “A portrait can look like us and still not be us.” The self-portrait is the persona at its most exposed, pressed into matter by fingers that never fully obey. The clay is shared and the hands are not: what gathers in the studio is less a portrait gallery than a congregation, one earth lent a different face by each sitter.
Yein Lee runs the process in reverse: matter first, role after. Her sculptures join what infrastructure sheds to what a forest drops: electrical cables, polymer gypsum, fiberglass, steel, repurposed plastic waste, dried moss, twigs. Then come what Horvath calls “functional identities”: 감시자 Gamsija (Watcher), 파견자 Pagyonja (Dispatcher), control-room vocabulary settling on them like a uniform. Each title passes through Hangul, romanization and English: one body, three names, a role translated twice. Scavengers, you are crying for you. how sweet (2024) turns the name into an address, half reproach, half lullaby.
Horvath then asks whether a room, too, can take on a persona. Paulina Semkowicz answers with a wall painting in acrylic paint and pigment, six by fifteen meters, titled not seeming, but being, a lowercase echo of the Latin motto esse quam videri. Semkowicz comes from theater painting, the craft of the backdrop, a surface whose whole vocation is to seem. Horvath reads moss, mold, patina and decay in its surfaces. Seeming, held long enough, becomes a form of being.
Mold is the hinge word, cutting both ways: the bloom of damp on an aging surface, the hollow from which a cast is drawn. Odie Lap Chun Chow works with the second, turning from the cast toward the mold, an absence Horvath declines to call emptiness. His two pieces share one title, Fragmented Borders (2026), one in plaster, one in clay and sand, the classic materials of the copy. The cast is the persona everyone sees. The mold is the one nobody does, the shape a self was poured into and left behind once it could stand.
A mold is also a border made solid, the surface where one form stops and another begins. Horvath’s opening question, where one person ends and the next begins, finds a physical answer here: not a wall but a hollow. Chow’s research runs through architecture and urban landscape toward the construction of identity, and for an artist living between Tallinn and Hong Kong, a fragmented border may be less a wound than a working condition.
Jakob Lena Knebl stages the border between two names. Ashley & Lena (2023) binds them with an ampersand, itself a fusion, the Latin et collapsed into one glyph, and one of the names already belongs to the artist. A high-gloss lacquered 3D print meets wood, fur and plastic: showroom finish against pelt, digital file against animal. Knebl trained in fashion and in Textual Sculpture, and Horvath sees identity dressed and rehearsed here. The sharper reading is that the costume is not a cover for a self but the self at its most legible.
The Latin persona first named the actor’s mask, and an old, probably false etymology hears in it per sonare, to sound through. Elisabet keeps the mask and withholds the sound. Horvath arrives at the persona as “the place where the self is continually being made”. The making here looks more like casting than invention, and no cast leaves the mold quite as intended. Alma never says she has become Elisabet, only that she could, if she really tried. In this hall, the self is a conditional tense.
