Ultimate Self belongs to the aluminium series, a body of work built around the possibility that reality may hold far more versions of us than the one we are currently living.

If every choice, encounter, fear, loss, act of courage and path not taken could lead toward another possibility, then perhaps somewhere within those realities exist countless versions of the same self — each shaped by a different life.

This work asks:

Among all the people we could become, is there a version of us that has come closest to truly knowing itself?

“Ultimate,” here, does not mean flawless.

It is not the most successful, the most powerful, the most admired, or untouched by darkness. To me, the highest version of a human being may be the one who has met that darkness and no longer needs to be governed by it.

The one who recognizes fear without becoming fear.
Who recognizes desire without becoming its servant.
Who can observe a thought before believing it.

There is something extraordinary in the moment a person can witness their own mind — stepping outside themselves, seeing their reactions, and returning with the freedom to choose differently.

Self-knowledge then becomes more than awareness. It becomes a way of living.

Across cultures and centuries, people have approached this longing through different languages: wholeness, virtue, awakening, natural alignment, self-realization, the perfected human. Yet they circle one enduring question:

What happens when we are no longer divided against ourselves?

Perhaps the deepest fulfillment available to us is not to become more, but to become less fragmented.

When what we know, feel, fear and how we act begin to speak the same language. When the parts we once rejected are no longer enemies, but information. When we know ourselves clearly enough that we are no longer controlled by what we refuse to see.

Within the logic of parallel realities, every possible version of us may have reached a different point in this process.

In one life, we may still be governed by fear.
In another, by ambition.
In another, by the need to be seen.
And somewhere, perhaps, exists a version that has learned to hold all these forces without surrendering completely to any of them.

Ultimate Self imagines the encounter with that version.

Not as a superior being.
Not as perfection.

But as something almost sacred: the self that is most awake to itself, most aligned with its own nature, and most conscious of the person it is choosing to become.

Perhaps that version is not waiting for us in another universe at all.
Perhaps every possible self already exists within us.

Perhaps the ultimate self appears each time we are able to see ourselves clearly — the light and the darkness together — and still consciously choose who we become next.

Maybe the Ultimate Self is not the perfect self.
Maybe it is the self that can finally see itself whole.

ULTIMATE SELF
Memory of Metal
Original work by Gülçin Araz
Mixed media on aluminium panel