FACELESS: What Remains When the Face Is Taken Away

Two texts lie side by side here. One is an invitation to artists to think about what remains of a person once the face is removed. The other is a manifesto for a new direction in art, arguing that art should happen not on the surface of an image but in the body, in presence, in the finite — through which the infinite sometimes opens.

At first glance these are two different conversations. One is about the face and its absence. The other is about the body and its limit. But read closely, and it becomes clear: this is one and the same question, asked from two different angles.

The question is this: what happens to a person when the familiar support of recognizability is taken away — and what happens to art when it stops being a way of confirming that recognizability?

FACELESS asks this through the face — the most obvious, most exploited, most quickly read sign of a person’s presence in the world. Raw Infinite Presence asks it more broadly — through the body, through material, through the very nature of the artistic act. But both texts push toward the same answer: a person’s genuine presence is not where they are easiest to identify. It is where identification stops working, and something else begins — something that can only be felt.

This essay is an attempt to hold both movements at once: to think about the face and its absence as a theme in art, and, simultaneously, about presence and its conditions as a method. We will move slowly, section by section, returning each time to the same core from a new angle. This is not an attempt to give a final definition of what FACELESS is. It is, rather, an attempt to build a space in which different works, different artists, different perspectives can meet one another without losing their own voice.

Let’s start with an observation so familiar we’ve almost stopped noticing it: we live in a culture organized around the face.

The face is the first thing we see in another person, and the last thing we forget. We read emotion from it before we hear a word. We judge character from it — often wrongly, but inevitably: psychology has long shown that first impressions form within fractions of a second and are difficult to revise afterward. The face is the interface through which a person presents themselves to the world, and at the same time, the surface onto which the world projects its expectations.

The digital age has pushed this logic to its limit. The face has stopped being merely a sign of presence — it has become currency. A profile photo unlocks social capital. Facial-recognition algorithms identify a person faster than they can say anything about themselves. The selfie is not just a photographic genre but a form of economic behavior: the face is put on display, evaluated in likes, converted into attention, and attention into status. In this system, the face stops being simply a part of the body. It becomes a product, a storefront, an avatar of itself.

It’s important here not to confuse critique with nostalgia. The point is not that things used to be more honest and are now more fake. The face as mask, as role, as a tool of social performance has always existed — the theatrical mask in antiquity was itself a literal acknowledgment of this fact, long before Instagram. The problem is not that the face became a social construct. The problem is the speed and totality of that construction: the world the FACELESS text describes is one where we are "constantly asked to be visible," where visibility has become an obligatory condition of existing at all — almost a civic duty.

In this context, refusing the face is a gesture not of escapism but of resistance. Not a flight from responsibility for one’s own image, but a refusal to accept that the image is the final truth about a person.

It’s worth drawing a parallel here with the diagnosis the Raw Infinite Presence manifesto makes about contemporary art in general. The manifesto speaks of "an era of absolute abundance of images and absolute scarcity of experience" — of vision having turned into scanning, and the image into a signal. Applied to the face, this diagnosis is especially precise: we see thousands of faces a day — in the feed, in advertising, in the crowd — and truly meet none of them. The face has become excessive precisely because it has become omnipresent. An excess of visibility has turned into a deficit of recognition in the deeper sense of the word — not identification, but recognizing a person as a person.

FACELESS offers an antidote not by multiplying images but by removing them. Not because the face is bad in itself, but because removing its familiar support is the only available way to give the gaze back the attention it has lost from overexposure.

To understand what exactly is being removed in the gesture of FACELESS, it helps to recall what the face has been for art throughout its history — not to compile an exhaustive catalogue, but to see how the function of the face as a cultural sign has changed over time.

In the earliest traditions, a facial image was often not a portrait in the modern sense but a way of preserving presence after death. The Fayum mummy portraits of late antique Egypt, placed over the face of the deceased, were not painted so a person could be "recognized" but so the soul could find its body again — the face here functioned as an anchor of identity beyond physical decay. This is one of the earliest cultural formulations of exactly what FACELESS is asking: the face as the final testimony that a person existed.

The medieval icon reverses this logic entirely. The face on an icon is not a portrait of a specific person and not an attempt at psychological likeness. It is a conventional sign, a window onto something else, where individual features are deliberately muted so that something other than the face itself can shine through it. Already here, in a deeply traditional, canonical form of art, is an intuition that FACELESS will return to centuries later: the face is most interesting not when it resembles someone, but when something happens through it.

The Renaissance portrait introduces a third logic — the face as proof of individuality, an assertion of a specific, unrepeatable "self" against a backdrop of feudal anonymity. The individual portrait becomes possible precisely when the very idea of a unique person, valuable regardless of lineage or class, becomes conceivable. From this point through the twentieth century, European art accumulates an enormous body of experience working with the face as a carrier of psychology, character, and social status — from the formal state portrait to Expressionist distortion of features as a way of showing inner states.

The twentieth century puts this tradition into question from within art itself. Picasso’s cubist fracturing of the face, Bacon’s distortions, the serial, almost mechanical faces of Pop Art — all of these are already experiments in doubting whether the face can reliably carry the truth of a person. Warhol’s mass-reproduced portrait — Marilyn, repeated dozens of times with shifting color — states directly that in an age of mass reproduction, the face becomes a sign without a signified, a surface behind which there is not necessarily anything at all.

And finally, our own era — the era of selfies, deepfakes, avatars, face filters — pushes this process to its logical extreme. The face can now be altered programmatically, with no necessary connection to what is happening inside. It becomes fully detached from the guarantee of authenticity it once implied.

FACELESS arises at exactly this point in history — not as the first gesture of doubt about the face’s sufficiency (art has staged such doubts repeatedly) but as a formulation of the question at a moment when that doubt has become a mass experience rather than the privilege of the avant-garde. If the face no longer guarantees truth, what does? This question, deeper than any specific aesthetic that might be attached to it, is the real content of the theme.

Twentieth-century philosophy gave the theme of the face a depth without which any discussion of FACELESS would be incomplete. It’s worth distinguishing at least two understandings of the face that are often conflated, though they speak of different things.

The first is the face as an ethical phenomenon — as that through which the Other looks at a person and makes a demand on them. In this tradition, the face is not an object of perception among other objects but something that cannot be reduced to an image: the meeting of gazes is itself an ethical event, binding prior to any rational decision. Here the face is not a surface but a rupture in the surface, a point at which the Other refuses to be fully understood and appropriated.

The second understanding is the exact opposite. This is the face as mask — as what a sociologist or anthropologist would call a social role, a persona in the literal, theatrical sense of that Latin word (persona originally meant precisely a theatrical mask). In this sense, the face is not a rupture but exactly a surface: a set of expressions a person puts on and takes off depending on the situation, the audience, the context. Sociology has long described everyday life as an ongoing series of performances in which the face is the primary instrument of impression management.

FACELESS works in the gap between these two understandings. On one hand, the theme openly acknowledges: the face "can be a mask, a defense, a habit, a role" — that is, it sides with the second, sociological understanding of the face as a construction, behind which there is not necessarily any truth. On the other hand, the refusal of this mask is not carried out for the sake of cynicism or exposure, but in order to reach something closer to the first understanding — the face as an ethical demand, a presence that cannot be reduced to an image or presented as a finished fact.

In other words: by removing the face-as-mask, the FACELESS artist does not cancel the face-as-encounter. On the contrary, they try to free it. As long as the face works as a mask — a recognizable, legible, socially functional surface — it conceals that rarer, more fragile thing that cannot be photographed: the sheer fact that in front of you is someone, not something.

It’s important to avoid the temptation of oversimplification — as if the "real" face were hiding somewhere beneath the "fake" one, and the artist’s job were simply to peel off the top layer and reveal the one underneath. That metaphor is too literal and too optimistic. The philosophical tradition described above tends to argue the opposite: what makes a person a person doesn’t have a form that can be finally shown at all. It is not a hidden face beneath a mask. It is something that exceeds every face, every visible form — a presence that can only be met, never fully seen through.

This is exactly why the theme states directly: "FACELESS is not about emptiness and not about the absence of personhood." The absence of a face here is not a minus, not a subtraction of something important. It is a way of ceasing to pretend that personhood can ever be fully presented, and of acknowledging that it is always more than any image of it.

Where the FACELESS theme asks "what remains if we remove the face," the Raw Infinite Presence manifesto answers a related but broader question: "where, in the first place, is the location where something can actually happen to a person?" And the manifesto’s answer is direct — in the body.

The manifesto’s thinking rests on a long-standing philosophical intuition: the body is not a vessel into which consciousness has been placed but the primary form of consciousness itself. We do not "have" a body as some extra possession alongside ourselves; in a sense, we are that body — thinking, feeling, bound in space and time. Abstract experiences — love, fear, ecstasy, grief — don’t exist somewhere in pure form, apart from physiology; they come to us as tightness in the chest, as quickened breath, as trembling hands.

From here follows a move in the manifesto that directly echoes the logic of FACELESS: if the body is primary in relation to any image, then the face too is only one part of the body — though the part most heavily worked over by cultural sign-making. The face is, in a sense, the most "dressed" part of the body: it is the first to be socially trained in expression, the first to learn to smile for the camera, the first to lie out of politeness. Hands, back, breath, gait, the weight of a step — these registers of the body are far less trained in pretense. This is exactly why turning to the body minus the face is not an eccentric formal device but a fairly logical step toward more raw, more honest material.

The manifesto introduces here a key idea for everything that follows: it is precisely the finite, limited, mortal body that is the only place where an experience of the infinite becomes possible at all — not despite its limitation, but through it. As long as we look for infinity in images — in scale, in repetition, in visual devices that imitate boundlessness (mirrored rooms, lines receding into perspective) — we remain at the level of illustrating an idea. But push a finite body to the edge of its own experience — exhaustion, pain, silence, extreme concentration — and at that point something sometimes opens that no longer fits within familiar boundaries.

Applied to the theme of the face, this means the following: the face, removed as a support, does not release emptiness but precisely the body in this expanded sense — the body as the primary, unedited carrier of presence. FACELESS, taken together with the philosophy of Raw Infinite Presence, stops being a theme about "absence" and becomes a theme about a shift of attention — from the most edited, most socially trained surface of a person toward those layers that still retain something of direct, unmediated contact with reality.

The Raw Infinite Presence manifesto describes three "exhaustions" of contemporary art — art as object, art as concept, art as identity. It is worth tracing this diagnosis in detail through a specific but revealing case: the genre of portraiture and, more broadly, any depiction of the face in contemporary art. This helps show that the FACELESS theme is not an isolated, local idea but a particular instance of a broader crisis the manifesto describes.

The portrait as object. When a facial image becomes, above all, a thing — a canvas of a given size for a given wall, a commodity at an art fair, an asset in an investment portfolio — it inevitably starts to live by the logic of a commodity. A recognizable face in a portrait (including the artist’s own face turned toward the mirror — the self-portrait as brand) sells better than an unrecognizable one. The market rewards legibility. Within these coordinates, refusing the face is economically disadvantageous: an anonymous work is harder to sell than a recognizable image. And precisely because of that, refusing the face within an artistic practice becomes a telling act — a refusal to play by rules in which the face functions first and foremost as a trademark.

The portrait as concept. A significant portion of twentieth-century conceptual art worked with the face not as material for direct experience but as an illustration of a thesis — about the construction of identity, about gender, about representation, about the power of the gaze. Such works often need an extensive curatorial commentary, without which they remain largely unintelligible. It’s important here not to dismiss the value of this tradition — it raised necessary questions. But the manifesto rightly points to its weak spot: a work that needs a translator risks remaining an illustration of a text that could have been written directly. FACELESS proposes the opposite movement — not to illustrate a thesis about the absence of the face, but to create a situation in which the viewer feels the consequences of that absence bodily, before any explanation.

The portrait as the artist’s identity. Here, perhaps, is the most delicate overlap between the two texts. An artist who works with the face (their own or someone else’s) as a signature device — a recognizable manner of painting faces, a repeating composition, a stable visual code — risks turning the very genre that is, by definition, supposed to be a conversation about a person’s uniqueness into an instrument of the artist’s own recognizability as a brand. The irony of the situation is that the genre originally meant to certify the individuality of the sitter ends up certifying, first and foremost, the individuality (or rather, the commercial distinctness) of the artist. FACELESS offers a way out of this trap not by rejecting craft or a recognizable hand — the manifesto states plainly that recognizability as a byproduct of honest work is not a problem — but by shifting focus from the image as a result to the process of presence that led to it.

Taken together, these three exhaustions explain why the FACELESS theme appears exactly now, rather than decades ago. It is not an arbitrary curatorial idea but a natural convergence point where market pressure, exhaustion with conceptualism, and the crisis of the artistic brand meet in a single question: what would remain if, from all three of these logics — commodity, explanatory, brand — we subtracted their most obvious support, the face?

The manifesto’s three words — raw, infinite, presence — offer not an aesthetic but an instruction, a working method. It’s worth testing how this instruction functions specifically in the context of FACELESS, rather than in the abstract.

Raw in the absence of the face. The rawness the manifesto describes is direct contact with material before it becomes a sign, a concept, a style. Applied to the face, this means: remove not only the depicted face itself, but also the reflex to turn its absence into a new, effective device. It’s easy to picture a blurred face, a face in shadow, a face hidden by a hood or a mask — as a fashionable visual gesture that quickly becomes a recognizable cliché of its own. Raw, in the context of FACELESS, is when the absence of the face is not a special effect, a trick, an intriguing puzzle of "what's under the fabric." It is when the absence of the face is an honest consequence of the artist having genuinely stopped looking for the truth of a person at that level — not an effective device layered over the same old logic of reading an image.

Infinite in the absence of the face. The manifesto describes the infinite as a quality of experience that exceeds its occasion — not a theme, but a result. Applied to faceless work, this means: the empty space where the face would be is not the content of the piece. The content is the excess that begins to happen within the viewer precisely because the usual point of visual anchoring has been removed. A gaze deprived of the face as an anchor is forced to keep moving — across posture, across light, across the texture of fabric, across what remains outside the frame — and in this wandering, something arises that sometimes feels like the sense that the person in the image is more than what could have been read from the features of their face. This is the infinite dimension of the theme: not the mystery of the face, but an excess of presence that in principle does not fit into any face.

Presence in the absence of the face. This is, perhaps, the most demanding of the three principles in the context of FACELESS. Presence requires that the artist, while working with a faceless image, actually be located in the body from which that image is created — rather than in an idea about anonymity as a fashionable theme. The difference between work that honestly investigates presence without a face and work that merely illustrates the current fashion for anonymity in visual culture is invisible at the level of form and entirely palpable at the level of contact with the viewer. Presence also demands something of the viewer: a stop. A quick glance at a faceless image easily reads it as an effective picture and moves on. Only by pausing can the viewer feel that shift of attention from image to feeling that the FACELESS theme is speaking about.

Taken together, the three principles give a criterion more important than any specific technique of execution: not how the absence of the face looks in the image, but what it does to the viewer at the moment of encounter.

The theme openly acknowledges the duality of anonymity: "for some, FACELESS is anonymity and the freedom to be beyond labels. For some, it is a feeling of loss, disappearance, blur." This duality deserves closer attention, because it defines the emotional range in which the entire theme can exist — from lightness to weight, from liberation to grief.

Anonymity as freedom has a long cultural lineage. The mask in carnival tradition is not a way of hiding from society but a way of temporarily stepping outside the power of one’s own social role: under a mask, a person stops, for a while, being who they are known as, and gains the right to be someone else — or sometimes simply to be, without the obligation of being someone specific. The pseudonym in literature, the anonymous hand in street art — these traditions know that removing name and face can be an act not of weakness but of strength: a way of saying something that would be impossible to say from one’s own, socially fixed face.

Digital culture has added another layer here: anonymity as protection. For many people — first and foremost for those whose identity, for one reason or another, makes them vulnerable — the ability to exist in a cultural space without a mandatory link between face and statement is not an aesthetic choice but a condition of safety. This should be said plainly, without romanticizing it: anonymity is sometimes not a philosophical gesture but a practical necessity, and the FACELESS theme is broad enough to hold this far less metaphysical, far more immediately life-and-death meaning as well.

But there is another side to the same coin. Anonymity can be not a choice but a state a person is forced into by circumstance — illness, memory losing the faces of loved ones, migration that erases recognizability in an unfamiliar cultural environment, aging that changes a face beyond recognition even for the person looking in the mirror. In this register, FACELESS is not about freedom but about loss: about the fact that a person’s image can fade against their will, and there is nothing liberating in that fading, only anxiety, grief, disorientation.

Importantly, the theme does not choose between these two poles — it deliberately holds them together, as a single range. And in this lies its strength, not its weakness: it does not reduce to one emotional note, does not dictate to the artist whether they should celebrate anonymity or mourn it. It offers a space in which works of directly opposite tone can coexist — from playful, almost light anonymity to a deeply personal statement about loss.

It’s worth recalling here the manifesto’s postulate on transience: "transience is not weakness. Transience is the only guarantee of authenticity." Applied to anonymity, this thought works as follows: if a person’s presence cannot be permanently fixed in a recognizable image, perhaps the problem is not a defect of the image but the very nature of presence — it was never meant to be permanently fixed. Anonymity, in this light, is not the loss of something that should have remained, but an honest acknowledgment that nothing human remains unchanged forever: not the face, not the name, not even the memory of it.

One of the most delicate threads in the FACELESS theme is memory: "for some, it’s a conversation about memory — when the face fades, but the feeling of the person remains inside." This observation rests on an experience familiar to nearly everyone: over the years, the faces of loved ones, especially those who have died, fade from memory faster than the sense of their presence does. A voice is forgotten in its exact sound but remains in its intonation. A touch is forgotten in its precise physical sensation but remains as a feeling of safety, or, conversely, of unease. Memory is selective, and one of its most durable parts is not the visual image but the emotional trace a person left behind.

The psychology of memory has long documented this asymmetry: episodic, image-based memory is more fragile — it distorts, gets filled in, and fades far faster than the emotional core of a memory. A person may no longer remember the exact features of their grandmother’s face, but can still recall, without fail, the feeling that arose in her presence. In this sense, the theme’s claim that "the feeling of the person remains" once "the image fades" is not poetic exaggeration but a fairly accurate description of how human memory actually works.

This observation directly overturns the conventional logic of portrait painting and photography, which have traditionally been understood as tools for preserving an image precisely in order to resist forgetting — recall again the function of the Fayum portrait. But if the most durable thing in memory is not the image but the feeling, then art’s attempt to fix the image turns out to be fighting the wrong opponent: the image will be forgotten regardless, while the feeling, if it can be captured in some form, has a chance to outlive the face.

This raises an artistic task far more difficult than simple portrait likeness: how does one make a work that conveys not what a person looked like, but what it felt like to be near them? This task is close to what the manifesto calls "art as an event of experience" — not documenting appearance, but creating a condition in which the viewer can undergo something analogous to the feeling that memory has preserved of the depicted person, even if the viewer never actually saw that person.

Working with memory in the context of FACELESS therefore need not be a nostalgic gesture. It can be an investigation of the mechanism of forgetting itself: exactly how an image decays, what goes first, what remains longest, which traces — a gesture, a silhouette, a patch of light where a face used to be — are capable of carrying the emotional weight that once belonged to features long since faded.

The theme names another register directly: "for some, it’s a way of talking about digital reality, in which we increasingly become images, avatars, shadows of ourselves." This thread deserves separate, clear-eyed treatment — without apocalyptic tone, but without naive optimism either.

Digital identity is built on a fundamentally different logic than pre-network identity. An avatar is not a portrait in the traditional sense: it is a controllable, editable sign of presence, often entirely unlinked to its bearer’s actual appearance. A person online can hold dozens of avatars at once, one for each platform, each audience, each mask of behavior. There is something in this multiplicity that directly continues the conversation about the face as mask discussed in the third section, but pushes it to a new technological scale: the mask is no longer singular — there can be as many masks as one likes, and none is obligated to be the "main" one.

It’s worth noting an important difference between digital facelessness and pre-digital anonymity. The classic mask — carnival, theatrical — hides the face but does not cancel the presence of a body behind it: under the mask there is still a concrete, physically bounded person. A digital avatar can dispense with that bodily anchor altogether — it exists as a purely informational object, under no obligation to correspond anywhere to its author’s body. This is a radical shift, and it explains why the theme of digital facelessness in a conversation about FACELESS sounds less like a special case of anonymity and more like its own, self-standing subject.

Here the Raw Infinite Presence manifesto offers an important counterpoint. Its entire philosophy is built on the claim that art happens only where there is a concrete, living, physically bounded body — "not the idea of a body, not the representation of a body." A digital avatar is, by definition, a representation — and a representation that has traveled especially far from its bodily source. Does this mean digital facelessness contradicts the manifesto’s philosophy of presence?

Not necessarily — but precision is required here. Artwork that simply aestheticizes the avatar, the shadow, the digital image as a fashionable subject genuinely risks staying at the level of illustrating a thesis about "digital reality" — that is, repeating the very trap of conceptualism discussed in the fifth section. But work that investigates precisely the gap between a living body — the artist’s or the viewer’s — and the digital shadow that body casts online is working not with the theme of the avatar but with exactly the tension between the finite and its image that the manifesto is speaking about. In that case, digital facelessness stops being a subject and becomes a precise instrument for making felt (more precisely — bodily felt) the very fact of the rupture between what a person is and what they are represented as online.

A working principle of selection can be formulated here for curator and viewer alike: a work about digital facelessness is interesting in the context of FACELESS not when it simply states the existence of avatars, shadows, interfaces — that is already a commonplace cultural fact — but when it makes the viewer physically, bodily feel the gap between living presence and its digital trace.

The Raw Infinite Presence manifesto introduces a distinction between the "artist-as-brand" and the "artist-as-conduit." The first builds a stable, recognizable identity as capital; the second, by contrast, enters each work anew, keeping faith not with a style but with the living. This distinction bears directly on the FACELESS theme — in two ways at once: as metaphor, and as a practical ethics of participating in the open call.

As metaphor: if the artist-as-brand is, essentially, an artist with a permanent, recognizable "face" (in the figurative sense — a stable manner, a repeating device, an easily legible signature), then the artist-as-conduit is an artist voluntarily walking the same path the theme proposes for the depicted person: a refusal of a guaranteed, pre-recognizable form in favor of more direct contact with the material. FACELESS, in this sense, is a challenge not only to how the artist depicts a person but to how the artist positions themselves.

The manifesto makes an important qualification here that must not be overlooked: a recognizable style is not itself a problem, if it is "a byproduct of honesty, not its replacement." Rothko painted rectangles his whole life, but each time out of genuine bodily contact with the canvas; his recognizability is a trace, not a program. Applied to FACELESS, this means the artist need not abandon their own hand, their own technique, even their own reputation in order to honestly engage the theme of the absent face. The danger lies elsewhere: the moment the absence of the face itself becomes part of a recognizable, replicable device — a fashionable visual signature of "that artist who photographs people without faces" — the theme stops functioning as a method and turns into a new version of exactly the identity-as-brand the manifesto calls for abandoning.

Worth recalling too is the manifesto’s postulate that the artist "is responsible for the precision of the invitation," while "the experience belongs only to the viewer." Applied to FACELESS, this distinction is especially valuable: an artist working with a faceless image neither should nor can guarantee the viewer any particular experience — recognition, unease, liberation, nostalgia. Their task is to create a precise situation in which that experience becomes possible; which feeling actually arises in a given viewer is no longer up to the artist.

A practical conclusion follows for the curator assembling the open call’s submissions: the selection criterion should not be the degree of literal correspondence to the theme — not how literally the face is absent from the image — but the precision of that invitation. A work can formally show a face and still be deeply faithful to the theme of FACELESS, if it investigates what in that face is a mask and what is a genuine trace of presence. Conversely, a work can literally hide the face and remain superficial, if that hiding is nothing more than an effective trick.

Any discussion of FACELESS would be incomplete without attention to the person standing on the other side of the work — the viewer. The Raw Infinite Presence manifesto insists: "the work exists only in the moment of experience. Before and after, it is material and memory." This claim maps especially precisely onto the theme of facelessness, because the absence of a face in an image is, among other things, a direct invitation for the viewer to complete work that a traditional portrait usually did on their behalf.

When a viewer looks at a portrait with clearly rendered features, much of the interpretive labor has already been done by the artist: the features suggest mood, age, character; the viewer can lean on these cues and form a judgment fairly quickly — the very hasty judgment the open call’s text warns about. When the face is absent, that support disappears, and the viewer must either stop and engage in a slower, more attentive reading of the remaining signals — posture, light, texture, context — or abandon looking altogether, letting the eye slide onward without pausing.

It is precisely in this fork that the risk and the potential of the FACELESS theme both lie. The risk is that a viewer accustomed to the fast, scanning gaze the manifesto describes will simply not give the work a chance — will walk past without stopping, because the usual point of fixation, the face, isn’t there. The potential is that this very absence of a quick anchor is exactly the means of returning the viewer to the attention the manifesto describes as "a state that must be created," not a given.

It’s worth recalling here a long-standing distinction in thinking about photography, between two different modes of engaging with an image: one general, culturally coded (easily read and discussed, fitting neatly into a style, an era, a genre), the other personal, accidental, an unpredictable prick that touches a particular viewer regardless of anything that could be said objectively about the image. Applied to FACELESS, this distinction takes on a special sharpness: an image without a face is much harder to hold in the first, general, culturally explicable register — because it is most often the face that serves as the anchor around which the cultural, stylistic, historical reading of a portrait is built ("this face is in the spirit of such-and-such an era," "this expression is typical of such-and-such a genre"). By removing the face, the artist, in a sense, raises the odds that the viewer will meet the work in the second, personal register — where the prick happens not because the viewer recognized a style or an era, but because something happened to them, personally.

This is no guarantee — nothing in art can be. But it is a direction worth keeping in mind: the work most faithful to the FACELESS theme is not necessarily the one that most technically flawlessly hides the face, but the one that genuinely slows the viewer down — that holds their attention longer than mere genre recognition would require.

One thread of the theme cannot be passed over: removing the face carries different political weight depending on whose face is being removed, and in what context.

For some social groups, invisibility has been a historically imposed condition, not a free choice — faces systematically left out of official history, out of museum collections, out of the media. For an artist coming from such a context, working with the FACELESS theme may sound less like a metaphysical statement about the universal nature of presence and more like a direct, politically charged claim: "I was never seen anyway, and now I am making that condition the subject of art, rather than simply enduring it."

For others, removing the face may, on the contrary, be a privilege — the ability to temporarily opt out of a visibility that was never forced upon them to begin with. The difference between these two positions is substantial, and a good curator assembling and presenting the open call’s works should be able to hold both conversations at once, without flattening them into a single, universal formula of "art about the absence of the face in general."

The gender dimension of the theme also deserves separate attention. The female face, in the history of Western art, has traditionally been the object of the gaze far more often than the subject of its own statement — "the one looked at" rather than "the one who looks." In this context, a woman artist’s refusal to depict the face may be not a gesture of retreating from representation altogether but a precise refusal of a centuries-old role as the object of someone else’s looking — a strategy distinct from one an artist for whom the problem of objectifying gaze was never as acute might choose.

The dimension of age adds another layer: the aging face is systematically pushed out, retouched, hidden in contemporary visual culture — ageism acts primarily through the face, through wrinkles, through the visible marks of time. An artist who honestly shows an aging face, or, conversely, works with its disappearance from public view, is engaging not with an abstract question of presence but with a very concrete social injustice.

None of these readings contradict the theme’s overall philosophy — they concretize it, filling the abstract formula "a person is more than their face" with lived, political weight. FACELESS is broad enough to hold both a metaphysical meditation on the nature of presence and a sharp political statement about whose presence society has found it convenient not to notice. The task for the curator and the viewer is not to reconcile these readings artificially, but to let each of them sound at full volume.

The Raw Infinite Presence manifesto warns that any artistic movement risks eventually freezing into an aesthetic — a set of recognizable visual markers by which a "work on the theme" can be identified. Applied to FACELESS, this risk is especially high, because the absence of the face already has an obvious, easily replicable visual vocabulary: blur, shadow, a back turned to the viewer, a face in fog, a face behind glass, a face erased by digital glitch. Each of these devices, taken individually, can be precise and honest. But gathered together into a recognizable canon of "what FACELESS looks like," they risk turning a living question into a trend — and a trend, sooner or later, into a cliché.

It's worth stating plainly: the FACELESS theme has no obligatory aesthetic, and should not have one. A work responding to the theme could just as legitimately be a sound installation containing not a single image; a text-based piece where a person's voice is conveyed without a single visual trace; a performance in which the body is fully present but the artist's face remains outside the viewer's field of vision throughout; a sculpture where the form of the human body is given through negative space — that is, through the emptiness the body left behind, rather than through the body itself. What unites these formally very different works is not an external marker but the internal criterion the manifesto names: not how the work looks, but what it does to the viewer at the moment of encounter.

A practical conclusion follows for the open call's organizers and viewers: encountering a work that literally shows no face at all should not automatically be treated as more "faithful" to the theme than a work in which a face is present, but its function as the sole carrier of a person's truth has been removed. And conversely — the mere physical absence of a facial image is no guarantee of depth: it can be just as superficial a cliché as the most banal, legible portrait.

We have traveled a long path — from a diagnosis of a culture of excessive visibility, through the history of the face in art, through the philosophical distinction between the face-as-mask and the face-as-encounter, through the bodily philosophy of the Raw Infinite Presence manifesto, through the three exhaustions of art as applied to portraiture, through anonymity in its two opposite meanings, through memory that outlives the image, through the digital shadow, through the figure of the artist-as-conduit, through the ethics of the viewer’s attention, and through the political dimension of invisibility.

If this path is gathered into a single formula, it might read something like this: FACELESS is not about what disappears, but about what remains once the fastest, most familiar, most easily exploited support for recognizing a person has been taken away. And the Raw Infinite Presence manifesto suggests exactly where to look for what remains: not in a new, more sophisticated image to replace the removed face, but in the body itself, in presence itself, in the sheer fact of direct, unmediated contact between artist, material, and viewer.

It is worth returning here to the theme’s closing lines, which perhaps state its essence most precisely: "not facelessness, but the possibility of seeing deeper. Not absence, but a particular form of presence. Not a rejection of personhood, but an attempt to feel it beyond its usual shell. Not about how a person looks, but about what remains of them within us."

That final phrase — "within us" — deserves particular attention at the very end of this text. FACELESS, contrary to first impressions, is a theme not so much about the person depicted as about the one looking. It asks not only "what do we see when there is no face," but, just as much, "what happens within us when our usual way of looking stops working." In this sense, the open call is not merely a set of works on a shared theme but a collective experiment in viewer attention — an attempt to temporarily disable the automatism of reading and to see what fills the space it leaves behind.

The Raw Infinite Presence manifesto calls art "a crack in reality," through which one sees not another reality but the depth of this one. Applied to FACELESS, this metaphor can be sharpened: in everyday life, the face often functions as an opaque surface on which the gaze stops, content to read emotion, age, status — and go no further. A work that honestly answers to the theme of FACELESS is an attempt to make that surface transparent, if only for a moment. Not to destroy it, not to abolish the face as such, but to let the gaze pass through it for a second — to where what cannot be seen but can be felt begins.

It is precisely there, in that gap between the visible and the felt, between the image and the trace, between the face and what came before it and what remains after — that the true space of this open call is located. The works gathered under the name FACELESS need not agree with one another on a shared visual language. It is enough that they agree on one thing: each of them, in its own way, is an honest attempt to reach a place the face long ago stopped leading the gaze to.