Naughty Dirty Bits
August, 2023
Online
Cinematography by mikey barrata
Edited & Colored by Adamska Rakhilkina
“Naughty Dirty Bits” is a video pairing that is half instructional manual on how to make your very own DIY hormones and half a decadent cooking tutorial. The two videos — each following the steps of making Testosterone and Estradiol, are in conversation with each other — flirt with the idea of art as activism, and insist on the concept of politics serving as the arena of invention and creativity.
In the year of 2023 when 566 anti-trans bills have been introduced in the USA, and hormone replacement therapy has been banned all together in the artist’s home country of Russia, the need to take your medical alterations into your own hands is especially searing for the global trans community.
These videos are not just decadent tutorials on how to create dishes of your own choosing, but a plea to both trans- and cis- communities to wake up to the stringent hierarchies of medical system, the panopticon control of the state over our biology. The plea to spearhead this molecular uprising and to take the reality of our bodies into own hands.
Face/Off
October, 2024
Video Essay created for Spam New Media Festival
“Face/Off” int ertwines the narrative of monstrosity — Ruin, Release, Rebirth, the narrative similar to the transsexual cutting as caring. The video is a carousel of Monsters: fictional — Frankenstein, Onryō or the Japanese vengeful spirits — and real — the great late French sex symbol Alain Delon with his ruthless beauty and grandezza, and the maelstrom of doctors guarding the gates to facial reconstructive surgery under the umbrella of “gender-affirming care.” “Face/Off” weaves in texts on monstrosity from Stryker and Preciado while threading auto-theory of my own phrenological experience in the surgeon’s office in the pursuit of the facial masculinization surgery, stitching my own Frankensteinian monster. Let the trans-flesh become the trans-image — now on screen.
Rape
May, 2022
Online
Cinematography by Sadaf Sadri
Edited by Adamska Rakhilkina
Currently in Post-Production
“Rape” is a sadomodernist investigation into forensics of PTSD that follows incestual sexual violence through filmmaking techniques while dissecting ideas of “watching” and “surveilling” in the meta-commentary of violence as entertainment for the audience.
Caretaker
August, 2023
Online
Cinematography by mikey baratta
Edited & Colored by Adamska Rakhilkina
“Caretaker” follows a specter that took an unconventional artist residency in a school of art. It is both — an intimate study of a superfluous man stuck in the academic setting like a ghost to its haunt throughout the series of endless nights; and a topographic portrait of the institution as shelter. This short film marries Chantel Akerman’s forlorn minimalism of “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels” and the side-splitting mania of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” presenting a fleshy ghost story against the backdrop of an American university.
Following Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: ‘haunt’ signifies both the dwelling-place, the domestic scene and that which invades or disturbs it. The OED lists one of the earliest meanings of the word ‘haunt’ as ‘to provide with a home, house’..
and, of course, after Kubrick’s The Shining: I’m sorry to differ with you, sir. But you are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I’ve always been here.
Get out your handkerchiefs — home is where the haunt is.