Hello Selfie

One of the first artworks to take on the contemporary selfie phenomenon as both its subject matter and form, Kate Durbin’s Hello Selfie! was first performed for Perform Chinatown in Los Angeles in 2014. Exploring self-objectification, surveillance, the spectacle, and the performance of the self both on and offline, Durbin was visually inspired by her Tumblr feed.

For Hello Selfie!, performers covered themselves and each other in hello kitty stickers, and then took selfies in a public space for an hour straight while ignoring the IRL audience in the spirit of what Durbin calls “passive aggressive performance art.” They uploaded the selfies in real time to a FB event wall, in another first—one of the first performance artworks to happen both IRL and on Facebook simultaneously, with real time audience participation in both spaces. The IRL audience also became a part of the piece by taking their own selfies alongside the performers within the space of the performance.

The piece was subsequently performed in Union Square NYC with Transfer Gallery (2014), and in Miami with Transfer Gallery and Kelani Nichole for the Pulse Art Fair (2015), commissioned by Helen Toomer.

The fourth iteration, Hello Selfie Men (2015), was performed with Arts Queensland in Australia with men performers.

Durbin's Hello Selfie documentation has been shown in two solo shows with Kelani Nichole’s Transfer Gallery NY, and in group shows at Exsquisite Corpse in the UK and Berlin curated by Sarah Faraday, The Wrong Biennale curated by Kamilia Kard, Body Anxiety curated by Jennifer Chan and Leah Schrager, upfor gallery, Peer to Space in Berlin curated by Tina Sauerländer, Picture Berlin, and VBKOE in Vienna curated by Julia Hartmann, among others.

Selected Press:

Hello Selfie in Time Out

Hello Selfie Miami in The New York Times

Hello Selfie Los Angeles in The Hundreds

Hello Selfie Miami in Art Net

Interview in Bullet Magazine

Kate Durbin and the New Feminist Aesthetic in Online Exhibition Practices

Interview in FEM Magazine

Interview in GRAPHITE

Hello Selfie Men in The Frontier

Interview in The Hairpin

Interview in DAZED

Interview in DAZED pt. 2

Hello Selfie Los Angeles in Paper Magazine

Hello Selfie Miami in Art Report

Hello Selfie Miami in Vice

Hello Selfie in Hyperallergic

Hello Selfie in Performing Identities

"The gaze has long been a hinge or pivot point for the internal and external. Hannah Wilke’s performances often got at those murky spaces between the binaries of artist/subject, inside/outside, and body/self—how they inform each other and fold in on each other. 'Through her myriad and often contradictory presentations of herself, Wilke solicits this gaze,' writes Amelia Jones, 'grafting it onto and into her body/self, taking hold of it and reflecting it back to expose and exacerbate its reciprocity.' With her selfie-centered project, Durbin updates the exploration of these spaces for the 2.0 generation." -Whitney Mallet, Opening Ceremony

“[Durbin uses] selfies [to] reclaim the often mocked and ‘feminine’ performance for the camera, as art, as a potentially empowering practice. [The Hello Selfie performance takes place] in LA’s Chinatown, with a group of women taking selfies for an hour straight. The women are decked out in Hello Kitty and glitter and unabashedly photograph their near-naked bodies. The video [documentation of the performance] also captures the reactions of the public filming pedestrians mocking or joyfully participating in the spectacle. In its position as irl performance, as well as a digital video, the work is able to document the way people objectify, or learn about objectification, in the process of spectatorship.” -Katie Rosenthal, The Hundreds, 2015