How do we perceive?

At the Tate Modern Collection exhibition, I was intrigued by Ibrahim El-Salahi’s 1961-5 piece “Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I” [Figure 1]. The work is dark and evokes a sense of disarray in the viewer, due to the lack of clarity within the ambiguous figures. The piece enables me to question: how do we perceive?

The lack of certainty within this piece is visually intriguing as there are many ways of distinguishing it. I conceive that this image depicts how individuals view themselves differently to how others do, as multiple figures appear in the piece at each glance, while new faces appear in each inspection. 

Perception itself relies on an individual's past experiences and knowledge, and El-Salahi seeks to ‘register and describe what [he] perceive[s] through the senses while remaining tightly bound to an elusive, indecipherable, metaphysical essence,’ (El-Salahi, ‘The Artist in His Own Words’, in Hassan 2013, p.89), highlighting the lack of visual clarity within his work.

This image reinforces my own understanding of perception and how it is something taught to us, rather than something individuals believe themselves. Perfection is measured by societal standards that the mass continuously internalise as standards evolve over time, highlighting how perception is not permanent. 

El-Salahi’s image visually conveys this idea of a mixed perception due to the equivocal atramentous figures that emulate the fluidity of perception. These figures metaphorically convey how an individual’s perception of self can be shrouded by what they perceive perfection to be, due to the ever-changing standards, emphasising that self perception is fundamental to how individuals perceive universally.