In today’s visually saturated culture, the traditional meaning of the portrait is slowly being lost. How is its role changing, and what does it mean to depict someone visually? Our minds are constantly bombarded by selfies and other portraits of the stars of the virtual world; they overwhelm the eyes and the imagination.
What new things can we add, how can we organize information, how can an artist innovatively work with the human likeness? If social networks are defining a new language, how can we break the ice of the visual clichés presented to us by today’s global society? These and similar questions were the first challenge faced by the organizers of Human Frontiers.

One key theme that has fundamentally influenced deliberations on human frontiers and on the possibilities offered by the self-portrait has been a focus on the invisible, on those aspects of the personality that remain hidden from the eye but that fundamentally shape our likeness and our perception of our own identity. Together, we asked the question: Are not, in fact, these hidden structures the cornerstones not just of the human subject but of all complex systems?

From technological systems (cables, connections, processor cores, machine mechanisms and underground tubes) to organic and ecological systems (underground rivers, atmospheric phenomena, plant transpiration, the movements of the earth’s crust, photosynthesis) and biological or microbiological layers (human organs, viruses, bacteria, mycelia, sap flow in trees, root systems, neural networks, the circulatory system, genetic codes) – behind it all, we can sense one single dimension, an intangible, invisible energy: the consciousness, the soul or spiritual principle. It is these invisible forces, regardless of how impossible they are to describe or visually depict, that shape our personality, our experience, and our relationship to the world.