"The exhibition, Masquerade: Representation and the Self in Contemporary Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, is intended to complement the Self Portrait : exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales; although it might be more correct to say that it contrasts with the latter exhibition. The contrast is immediately signalled by the title. "Self-portrait" is bifurcated into "representation" and "the self" and the possibility of these two terms uniting is put even further into doubt by "masquerade", a term which foregrounds dissimulation and disguise. In short, the approach of the exhibition can be described as subscribing to typical postmodern scepticism about identity, that is, identity is presented as at the very least unknowable, at most illusory, and certainly something falsely presumed to be fixed, coherent, stable, or the clear origin point of the subject's actions. This is succinctly summarised by the curator of th eexhibition, Rachel Kent. She notes that much of the work in the show suggests that "identity is inherently unstable, or subject to change and revision". Changeability and instability are, in turn, linked to a questioning of the very concept of identity. Kentcontinues: "In some works a central 'core' of identity is challenged or negated altogether,and substituted instead by endless simulacra, rather like a hall of mirrors that reflectrepeatedly back at one another." -- by Susan Best.