Glodi Bahati is a Congolese-born photographer raised in Uganda as a refugee. She now resides on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, where she uses art as a tool for self-reflection. Bahati meditates on how growing up as a refugee girl created an understanding of the self through a habitual act of assimilation. Whether it was for survival or belonging, Bahati felt that whichever version of herself she presented to a particular environment needed to be palatable. Selfhood was never something real to hold on to, but something ever-changing.
In her ongoing series, Fragments of Self, Bahati works to understand the fluidity of identity. She questions the ways we shrink and perform the self in conjunction with living under oppressive systems like patriarchy, white supremacy, and fatphobia in order to appear more acceptable. In these vivid and intimate self-portraits shot in the artist’s bedroom, she questions how much of that outside perception she has internalized.
Being a refugee in Uganda as a girl, I felt like my body and selfhood was always in other people’s hands but my own. As a woman, I’ve carried that feeling with me.
Making Fragments of Self was intense and freeing, because for a moment, I saw myself not through an oppressive lens muddled with white supremacist and sexist ideas, but instead within a lineage of Congolese women in my family who are fascinating, resilient, and incredibly creative.
Being a Congolese refugee deeply shaped the way I understood myself in relation to the world. Because of this experience, I had created fragmented versions of myself in childhood and adulthood as a way to survive and/or be accepted. I decided to put myself in front of the camera to confront those different selves.
The act of taking my own picture, looking at and sharing the self- portraits, felt like an act of definition, finally seeing myself not in parts but as a whole.
My visual focus for the photographs was to convey a feeling of elusiveness and intensity. Some of the images have me looking at the camera, some are with my back turned, and others are filled with movement and colour, representing how the pursuit of selfhood is difficult to pin down and is ever-changing.
Glodi Bahati is a Congolese-born photographer, raised as a refugee in Uganda. Bahati currently practices art and resides on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg.