INSTAGRAM AND REALITY: INSTAGRAM NARRATIVES OF AMELIA ULMAN AND ABDOU DIOUF

Abstract

The use of social media tools with a visual interface has become an integral part of daily life. This has resulted in the rise of selfies, which are personal photographs posted on social media platforms. Instagram is one of the social media platforms where images or selfies from daily life are shared. The authenticity or reality of the personalities, selves and lives portrayed on social media platforms such as Instagram, especially through selfies, has brought about various debates. At the same time, the use of social media in art as a subject or medium due to such features adds a different dimension to this situation. The potential of an artistic project to manipulate reality through selfie photographs reveals the importance of this study. Based on this point, this study aims to question how real the selves and lives presented on social media platforms are, especially in the case of Instagram, one of the most popular social media channels. Two projects produced with two different artistic concerns that allow this were selected as a sample. Among the social media platforms, Amelia Ulman's Excellences and Perfection Project, which highlights the social domination of the female body through the posts made on her Instagram account, and the profile posts opened in the name of Abdou Diouf, which tells the story of a migrant's journey of hope from Africa to Spain, which was created for the promotional film of the Getxophoto Photography Festival. In this research, which is based on the discourses of Jean Baudrillard, Erving Goofman and Hal Niedzviecki together with the samples, it has been found that social media transforms the identities that individuals create or want to create in the online environment into hyperreality by going beyond rational reality.