“Des ID” by Lee Kern is a lenticular image of an identity document. The work presents a fictional, genderfluid ID in which the portrait shifts depending on the viewer’s angle.

Through the lenticular technique, the image alternates between different facial attributes — lips, beard, made-up, unmade — thereby disrupting the fixed visual logic of conventional passport photographs. What is typically presented as a clear, standardised representation of identity becomes unstable and ambiguous: the personal image. By intervening in the visual language of bureaucratic systems, the work reveals how identification documents inscribe normative notions of gender and can produce moments of misidentification. In this context, the shifting image also points to the precarity experienced by trans* people, particularly in situations such as border controls, where recognition of identity is closely tied to security and freedom of movement. At the same time, the work introduces a playful, almost glitch-like quality, suggesting that such systems can be understood not only as instruments of control, but also as spaces for appropriation and resistance.

The work asks how identity is constructed and regulated — and how visual systems might be used to challenge exclusionary structures.

Lee Kern is a designer and artist working at the intersection of sculpture, photography and performance. As part of the drag scene, Kern uses their own body as a medium to question and reconfigure notions of beauty and gender, often drawing on institutional visual languages to expose and unsettle normative frameworks.

Giuseppe Campuzano developed the related work “DNI (De Natura Incertus)” in 2009. Although Lee Kern was not aware of this work at the time of creating Des ID, the artist and curators have chosen to acknowledge this connection, not least in relation to a broader history of trans visibility.