A self-portrait by the Flemish artist, Caterina van Hemessen (1528-1587) is in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel. This exceptional painting is considered the first self-portrait of any artist depicted working at an easel. Using film, text, and mirrors, Matthew Buckingham’s installation reflects on the nature of self-portraiture and asks viewers to navigate, metaphor­ically and literally, their relation to van Hemessen’s image. A looping 16mm film is projected onto an optical mirror, which bounces the projected image onto a small freestanding screen.  This silent film visually investigates the space, emblems and ambiguous inscriptions found in van Hemes­sen’s self-portrait. By greatly enlarging fragments of the painting, it replaces the original continuity of the work with a typology of forms.  On the walls are twelve framed texts initially appear illegible as they are printed in reverse.  Using plexiglas hand mirrors, visitors can “decode” the texts, drawing out a meta-narrative around the film that meditates on Caterina van Hemessen’s story, and on the conceptual nature of self-portraiture. Van Hemessen, the daughter of the painter Jan Sanders van Hemes­sen, learned her trade as a youth in Antwerp and won renown under the patronage of Maria of Austria. She has been the subject of several inves­tigations into the gender politics of art and repre­sentation (including Linda Nochlin’s seminal study of female artists), and a recent monograph. In Buckingham’s project, Hemessen’s self-portrait, executed in 1548, is viewed from the perspective of the pres­ent day. Her image hails the viewer and synchro­nizes, for a moment, our time with hers, marking a complex relation between artist, artwork, viewer and a mediating mirror. We stand where she stood in relation to her own image. Buckingham’s work often questions the role that social memory plays in contemporary life, examining the dynamic connections between the present and fantasies of the past.  His installations and interventions always reflect not only on a given image or subject, but also on their own spatial, temporal and discursive structures. Sidestepping a contemporary pre-occupation with the grammar of modernist forms, this work looks at a much deeper history of images, imagining portraiture as a kind of conceptual painting and examining its cognitive, psychological and ultimately social processes.