Master of Visual Arts / We all play roles in life. This paper is a personal reflection on identity, and the questioning of this identity. The writer allows the reader into a dream like environment where a life role is acted out as autobiographical narrative through appropriation and reference to the other. Theoretical sources include Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Joseph Kosuth. With reference to these sources, comparison is made between Jan Vermeer’s seventeenth century portraits of women and Bertolt Brecht’s early twentieth century epic theatre.

Master of Visual Arts / We all play roles in life. This paper is a personal reflection on identity, and the questioning of this identity. The writer allows the reader into a dream like environment where a life role is acted out as autobiographical narrative through appropriation and reference to the other. Theoretical sources include Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Joseph Kosuth. With reference to these sources, comparison is made between Jan Vermeer’s seventeenth century portraits of women and Bertolt Brecht’s early twentieth century epic theatre.