Pandrogyne, 2024
Pandrogyne revisits the radical proposition of Lady Jaye and Genesis P-Orridge: love as a site of morphological revolt. In this series, two trans subjects stand before the camera not as fixed identities but as collaborators in a shared becoming. What emerges is an embodied experiment in leaking into one another while remaining distinct. Transition here is a duet, a process of mutual contamination that insists: gender is not a stable noun but a verb performed in relation.
The camera is both accomplice and antagonist. In the lineage of John Berger and Hito Steyerl, Pandrogyne asks who holds the power to see, and who becomes the seen. The mirror doubles the lens and multiplies the positions of viewer and viewed until no role remains pure: each subject watches themselves, watches the other, is watched by the apparatus, and watches us watching them. What initially appears as erotic display becomes an inquiry into surveillance, authorship, and desire. Instead of submitting to the camera’s historical function as a taxonomic machine — the one that classifies, genders, and disciplines — the subjects use it to shapeshift, to stage new anatomies that refuse legibility.
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, 2023
Part of a collection of 12 digital images Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité is a photography-based installation work by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina that features a tear-away calendar of 2023 with each month presenting Adamska injecting hormone replacement therapy in front of the fraternity houses of the University of Washington (Seattle, USA). Using their body as an archive in itself and commenting on the performativity of gender roles while capturing images of their own performance, Adamska synthesizes their gender transition and throws a wrench into the bio-essentialist binary system of Greek life, subverting ideas around traditional performances of masculinity revealing new, unseen combinations of fixed gender roles. Using calendar form as a tongue-in-cheek aspirational artifact and the juvenile locale for their rebellion Adamska comments on the gender presentation as a purchasable, customizable good. The image enclosed is the titular one presenting the month of July.
Long Live the Petty-Bourgeois Dictator!, 2023
A photographic tryptic by Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina, Long live the petty-bourgeois dictator! combines self-portraiture and still-life-like images of immgration documentation, a suspended bloodied mattress and the artist themselves with a film director’s chair.
The left panel presents tied up pre-transition feminine documents — a panopticon of tied up IDs, a passport, a birth certificate and a marriage certificate. The central panel examines Hollywood's idea of machismo, presenting their naked body, exposing scars from their gender-affirming top surgery, along with a director’s chair, suspended with shibari ropes. This panel enacts Hito Steyerl’s definition of a filmmaker not as a crazed-up genius but a victim of their own oppressive power. The right panel presents aspects of their experiences as a person assigned female at birth, questioning the flimsy and politicized meanings of femininity, childhood and vulnerability.
The tryptic presents a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the ourobouric nature of oppression.
Nuclear, 2022
Nuclear showcases distorted human form of femmes, queers and crossdressers from the South of the USA (Louisiana and Texas) emphasizing the interrelation between the personal and the social in a monochromatic world where marginalised desires also inadvertently but crucially embody political gestures in the attempt to deconstruct a preconceived idea of a classical decadent nude.
Inspired by the surrealist worlds of Antoine D’Agata and Jacob Aue Sobol, where the raw, natural body is juxtaposed against abstract surroundings, Adamska’s work takes body parts — that are so often misrepresented in media as solely objects of desire — and intentionally robs them of their sensuousness in order to challenge the tradition of the typical nude image created not for the sake of the model but for the beholder. In its place, Adamska offers a nakedness that is devoid of any moral posturing, a simple matter of fact that allows subjects to feel safe and secure in their own skin. That is why they use obscuring environments, shadowed angles, and unclear shapes to confuse the viewer, robbing them of the usual markers that prompt them to equate nakedness with an instant sexual urge.
This series is about and for the liminal individuals. It has been taken on a cheap film camera as only the analog medium allows for complete anonymity of the image up until the point of development. Neither the model nor the photographer can anticipate the result, hence allowing for an unobstructed and genuine dialogue between them.
Russian Taunt, 2021
Russian Taunt is a portrait collection of Russian women that creates a brutalist, red soaring world where a lesbian desire is an inadvertent political gesture.
Russian Taunt is revolved around the bodies and identities of queer lesbian couples and single individuals from marginalized queer communities of Russia subtextually touching on the draconian anti-gay laws of Adamska’s home country and introducing the ideas of anonymity, obfuscation and self-censorship into their practice. Living as a feminine queer who immigrated to the USA following the conservative changes in their homeland, Adamska feels it is important to make art focused on the dichotomy of sexuality and nakedness through the lens of the queer gaze. Inspired by the authenticity of queer photographers such as Catherine Opie and Zanele Muholi, their hope is not just to document the lives of liminal communities that they see my their reflection in, but to create an intimate bond with them using the lens as a gluing agent.
Russian Taunt is an attempt to depict queerdom without pressuring the models to actually model, without using the camera voyeuristically. The camera is nothing but a room with a two-way mirror in it, obscuring the interior from those who would leer while allowing the model inside a chance to observe the world without self-consciousness.