Face blindness is like dyslexia. Prosopagnosics have difficulty in putting a face ‘together’, as it were. What is normal to most of us, is not for people with face blindness. Just like it, art is heavily dependent on recognition. From the Mona Lisa to Girl with the Pearl Earing, the world’s most beautiful art can be easily recognisable by the faces in the picture.

We briefed an artist to create portraits that distorted perception on facial recognition and to explore the effects that a hereditary condition can have on cultural and personal identities.

So if art reflects life, our idea was to create art that reflects a unique, and remarkable condition that affects millions. But hardly anyone is aware of.

We needed to portray an extraordinary condition in a captivating way, while staying true to the condition and its hereditary aspect.

So limited edition portraits and frames were carefully curated. The paintings conveyed the hereditary aspect, while the distortions used digital-like alterations to represent its effects on contemporary life.

The paintings took weeks to depict the condition in a new style, while remaining true to two important aspects: the effect of the condition itself as well as the hereditary aspect.

Everything from the wood for the frames to the colours in the paintings, and from the manipulation used to the angles and defragmentation – make the viewer witness the glitch in the brain that reflect what prosopagnosics see when they’re looking at faces.

With no budget:

Online tests increased exponentially.

Research on Middle East subjects rose by 230%.

Vital and relevant studies increased to better help the research teams.

People got to both learn and inform themselves on a condition they’d never heard about.