Déjà Vu Déjà Vu

A Self in Reflection

2020 - 2021 | Copenhagen

There are moments in time that feel like echoes. As if I have already lived them, as if another version of myself, somewhere in the vast corridors of memory or imagination, has already touched, already breathed, already seen. Déjà Vu Déjà Vu is one of these moments—an image that arrived before I consciously created it.

It began as a fleeting subconscious visualization, an imprint of a sensation rather than a fully formed thought. A duality, a split, a self encountering itself. The feeling was familiar, yet foreign—like catching one’s own reflection unexpectedly and, for a brief instant, not recognizing the person looking back. I grasped onto that sensation and built it into an image, constructing a scene that blurred the edges between past and present, reality and illusion.

A Mirror, A Self-Doubling

The figure in the drawing is not two people but one—a self split, multiplied, mirrored. The golden object in the hand is a mirror—the tool of self-recognition, self-deception, self-fragmentation. Holding it up, I am both the observer and the observed, the subject and the reflection. But the mirror does not reveal. In its surface, no face is shown, only light. The act of looking becomes an act of projecting, of seeking meaning in an empty frame. The mirror is the portal between the two selves, the moment where past and present overlap. Is the figure in the foreground looking at her future self, or her past self? Or is the mirror simply reflecting absence, an ungraspable void where an answer should be?

Before it was a drawing, this moment was an orchestrated image—a staged performance captured in a reference photograph. In the setting of an intimate interior, I arranged my body, positioned the mirror, set the composition. But despite its deliberate construction, the image carries a sense of spontaneity, as if the body has settled into a moment of genuine ease, unaware of the gaze upon it.

This tension between the real and the staged, the natural and the composed is central to my work. A self-portrait is never truly immediate—it is a mediation, a negotiation between how we perceive ourselves and how we choose to present that perception. By consciously constructing this scene, I confronted my own image not just as an individual, but as a shifting, plural entity.

Drawing is a process of revelation. The first lines define the structure, but as the work progresses, the image begins to assert its own logic. What started as a mirror in my hand became a radiant golden form, reflecting not a face but an abstraction—light, energy, something beyond tangible representation.

The passage of time during the drawing process became integral to the piece itself. Over thirty hours, the figure evolved, gained weight, deepened in contrast, softened in certain places, sharpened in others. The drawing became something more than the reference photograph—something felt, rather than simply seen. A conversation between control and surrender.

Ultimately, Déjà Vu Déjà Vu is about the multiplicity of self, the way identity is never static but always shifting. It is about memory as a mirage, about how we meet past versions of ourselves in unexpected moments. It is about self-recognition and self-estrangement, about the fluidity of time and the illusions we construct to make sense of it.

And it is about that ungraspable feeling—the déjà vu—that sensation of having already arrived in a moment before we have even stepped into it. Perhaps, in some way, I had already drawn this before my hand ever touched the paper.