Time Travels: Frida Kahlo on Identity as Performance

Welcome to Ornela’s Time Travels, where I talk to dead artists, writers, collectors, and occasionally chaotic personalities about power, patterns, and why we keep making the same mistakes with better technology.

Ornela: Frida, your image is everywhere now. Tote bags, coffee mugs, Halloween costumes. You’ve become an aesthetic.

Frida: lights cigarette So I’m a costume now? Tell me – do they also paint themselves bleeding? Broken spine exposed? Or just the pretty parts?

Ornela: Just the pretty parts. Flower crowns mostly.

Frida: Of course. They want to perform “Frida” without the pain that created Frida. This is why I painted my pain – so it couldn’t be separated from my beauty. But your Instagram has done it anyway.

Ornela: You wore Tehuana dress deliberately. That was performance too – you weren’t Zapotec.

Frida: eyes sharp I chose Mexican identity in a country colonized by Europe and dominated by America. My mother was Spanish-indigenous. My father was German. I could have performed European. Instead I chose Tehuana because it said: Mexico is indigenous, Mexico is powerful, Mexico is OURS. Performance with political purpose.

Ornela: But was it authentic if you chose it?

Frida: Is anything authentic if you’re aware of yourself? The private Frida who cried alone – that was real. The Frida in Tehuana dress at exhibition openings – that was MESSAGE. The Frida in my paintings with exposed heart – that was ART. All me. All true. All carefully constructed.

Ornela: Instagram has “aesthetic categories” now. People curate entire identities.

Frida: laughs bitterly I curated “Mexican revolutionary artist aesthetic.” Every artist curates. The difference is I painted the TRUTH underneath. My broken body. My rage. My desire. Your cottage core girls posting bread they baked – do they also post the depression? The messy kitchen?

Ornela: Usually no.

Frida: Then they’re lying. I performed strength while painting weakness. The Tehuana dress said “I am proud Mexican woman.” The paintings said “I am dying inside this body.” Both true. Your Instagram allows only the dress, never the dying.

Ornela: People with chronic illness now post about it constantly. “Chronic illness influencers.” Sometimes they’re accused of faking.

Frida: I was called hysterical. Attention-seeking. Diego told people I invented pain for drama. Then they did surgery and found my spine was ACTUALLY broken in three places. Performance doesn’t mean fake. It means making strategic choice about what to show. I showed my pain as ART. Your chronic illness influencers show their pain as EVIDENCE. Both valid.

Ornela: You’ve become a feminist icon, a queer icon, a disability icon –

Frida: interrupts I was all of these. I was none of these. I was FRIDA. The labels are your need for simple narrative. I was never simple. I could be communist and wear expensive jewelry.

Revolutionary and vain. Disabled and sexual. Your platforms want consistency. Life is not consistent.

Ornela: The unibrow – that was deliberate too?

Frida: touches eyebrow Men told me to pluck it. I made it darker. If I’m going to be looked at – and as woman, you’re always looked at – I decide what they see. This is power.

Ornela: But now “Frida aesthetic” is commercialized. Forever 21 selling Frida t-shirts –

Frida: angry They sell my image without my pain. They want the flowers, not the thorns. The dress, not the blood. This is capitalism – take the revolutionary, remove the revolution, sell what’s left. I painted myself to say “I EXIST, I HURT, I MATTER.” They turned me into decorative object.

Ornela: What’s the difference between authentic performance and hollow performance?

Frida: RISK. I risked showing my broken body, my sexual desire, my communist politics in conservative Mexico. Risk means the performance costs you something. Your influencers performing curated perfection – what does it cost them? Usually nothing. I performed truth. Harder. Lonelier. But nobody can take it from me.

Ornela’s note:

Frida understood something Instagram’s algorithm doesn’t: authenticity isn’t about showing your “real self” – it’s about showing the contradictions. The way you can be strong and broken. Vain and revolutionary. Performed and genuine.

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The “Frida aesthetic” people copy is the armor she wore. The art she made was the wound underneath. You can buy the armor at Urban Outfitters for $24.99. The wound, you have to earn.

Your Instagram aesthetic is a brand. Frida was a manifesto painted in blood. Know the difference.

*Images selected by Nadiia Puzakova.