Kai Bos

"In ‘A refusal to be invisible’, I explore what it means to be visible without being fully captured or understood. My series of self-portraits emerged from my personal experience of fragmentation: the feeling that my inner experience never fully coincides with how my body, face or identity is read from the outside. Rather than smoothing over that difference, I deliberately leave it visibly present in the work. I do not hide seams, constructions and traces of the creative process; on the contrary, they contribute to the presence of the image.

I draw on my experiences of being transgender, having autism and Tourette’s, but I do not attempt to translate these into a universally comprehensible narrative. A complete transfer of experience seems impossible; there is always a distance between me as the creator and the viewer. It is precisely within that distance that space is created for a different kind of encounter, based not on identification, but on attention.

The portraits appear in ever-changing combinations. No single image functions as a definitive version of myself, and no single moment reveals the whole. The installation therefore remains changeable and unstable, as if meaning is constantly being reshaped in relation to the space and the gaze of another.

My work does not call for a solution or an explanation. Rather, it exists as a form of presence: a silent refusal to remain invisible."