Quantum physics challenges our sense of linear time. Some interpretations suggest that past, present and future can coexist, which pushes us to ask a simple question: if multiple realities can happen at once, how do humans construct identity? Is identity a shifting pattern of consciousness?

As we grow, identity forms through childhood, family and the world around us. We absorb social meanings and everyday interactions. Our relationship with the present shapes how we recognise ourselves. Over time that identity changes — the person you were seven years ago can feel like a stranger.

In Becoming, artists explore how personal processes, experience and the act of making work create and remake identity. The process of accretion, the traces that are kept and the gestures that are erased are the same acts by which we craft ourselves. Our human-centred view of the world often produces comforting stories about how things are. This show aims, in a subtle way, to unsettle those stories and to reveal the neural, cultural and narrative mechanisms that shape what we see and who we think we are.

Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf offers an image of a hall of mirrors where many moments and constructions face the protagonist at once. The show asks what those projections are rooted in. How do memory, habit, hope and the unintegrated parts of self stack up and appear? And crucially, how does making another object, another layer or another gesture change the artist and the viewer alike?

Text by Roberto Rivadeneira