Confronting or embracing the foreigner within? Hidden faces of identities as played out in the art exhibition, Dis-Location /Re-Location. Leora Farber Abstract Julia Kristeva’s advocation of the stranger/foreigner which ‘… lives within us [as] … the hidden face of our identity …’ 1 and the dichotomy of Self/Other of colonial discourse, are examined in relation to how they play out in my art exhibition Dis-Location/Re-Location. 2 The latter explores the “immigrant” experiences of two personae: myself, and a colonial woman, Bertha Marks (1862-1934), whose experiences of alienation and dislocation as an immigrant to South Africa from Sheffield in 1886, evokes tentative commonalities with my experiences of ‘foreignness’ in post-apartheid South Africa, as a postcolonial, white, second-generation female. In the images, the Anglicised protagonist grafts indigenous South African aloes into her skin, in an attempt to conjoin racial and cultural differences. However, as Colin Richards notes, this process is not without tensions, as grafts can be ‘… monstrous misfits attesting to the effects of our most well-intentioned ‘cross cultural’ contacts’. 3 Although the protagonist’s grafts arise from her desire to integrate, they also signify cultural contestation. As foreign to the body, the aloe plant represents an indigenous, alien culture, which takes root and disfigures, turning the protagonist into something akin to a hybrid, ‘monstrous misfit’. Emphasis is on the combination of differences through processes that imply bodily violation, disfiguration and pain. These indicate not only physical, but psychic trauma inherent in acculturation processes. Grafting enables a closeness to the other that is simultaneously threatening and liberating, as it opens up an ambivalent space of abjection, which, as Kristeva notes, threatens ‘… the integrity of the … self’, yet offers a generative ‘… liminal space where self and other may intermingle’. 4 Speculative analogies between abjection, Sigmund Freud’s Unheimlich and Homi K. Bhaba’s (1990:219) ‘Third Space of Enunciation’ are suggested, as it is in these spaces of in-betweenness that new formations of hybrid, postcolonial identities are potentially evoked.