There is an electrifying, if unnerving, vitality to Kristina Rozhkova’s first collaboration with cult impartial writer Void. Both a protest and a report, Gut Feeling is an unflinching have a look at what it means to carry one thing or somebody in opposition to their will, in addition to at their request.
The photographer divides her life into ‘before’ and ‘after’ her arrest and incarceration by Russian authorities. This ordeal started in June 2024, when Male State, a male supremacist group lobbied for her arrest after a photograph shoot in a cemetery was deemed blasphemous. The group focused Rozhkova and a few of her collaborators, accusing them of ‘insulting the religious feelings of believers’, a authorized article that has grow to be an more and more highly effective instrument of censorship in Russia. Rozhkova subsequently spent two brutal months in a pre-trial detention centre, 4 months underneath home arrest and one other 12 months of month-to-month courtroom hearings, all through which she lived in concern of re-arrest. Rozhkova now lives in exile and has been recognised as a political prisoner.
An eloquent and beneficiant communicator, she explains that her imprisonment in a room with 13 different girls, every with their very own (denied) wants, felt like “trapping different species of animals in a single cage”.
“We were entirely incompatible,” she continues, “with completely different ways of life and different voices. In nature, [such different] species are not meant to coexist so closely; they could easily kill each other. It felt like a violent experiment. A kind of madness.”
Gut Feeling confronts uncomfortable truths about humanity: a species that considers itself superior to all others, regardless of its explicit capability for cruelty and manipulation. Rejecting the usage of skilled fashions and constructed units, Rozhkova affords unfiltered glimpses of her social circle: gap-toothed and bloody-nosed kids, domme/sub play. These sit aspect by aspect with caged animals: jumbles of white mice bred as reptile meals, straining in opposition to steel bars or escaping from jars; milk-white specimens floating in formaldehyde; industrial milking machines clamped on the teats of an exhausted cow’s udder.
Already built-in throughout the BDSM neighborhood, Rozhkova conceptualised Gut Feeling earlier than her imprisonment. Having studied philosophy, she was, at the moment, absorbed with how the master-slave dynamic manifests inside fashionable capitalist relations. “Submissives are often individuals with significant financial means,” she observes, “who use their resources to step down from elevated positions and play out this role. It creates a paradoxical dialectic where the one submitting ultimately retains control.” Following her incarceration, the human-animal relationship surfaced as an more and more highly effective analogy. Human palms forcing open canine’ jaws recur all through the e-book – an unnerving, ambiguous picture, acquainted from vet check-ups, suggestive of care but in addition management.
Rozhkova’s personal mom was a canine coach. Born close to the Ural mountains, Rozhkova describes the bull terrier she grew up with, who acquired her mom’s extra breast milk, as a ‘milk brother’ and her closest good friend. Instead of summer time camps or holidays, her childhood was spent travelling round canine exhibits. “Our life was filled with a constant cycle of births, illnesses and sometimes deaths,” she says, noting that her immersion within the animal world led to feeling misplaced within the human one and extreme bullying. “It was incredibly hard for me to build peer communication.”
For Gut Feeling, Rozhkova spent months trailing vets, reptile breeders, hunters and zoologists, photographing huge, industrial farms in addition to small homesteads. “It was vital for me to investigate this theme to the absolute maximum, to experience and document it from the inside.” While recording stark discrepancies in method to welfare, the photographs reveal Rozhkova’s eye for an uncanny type of storytelling. The beautiful curvature of a goose’s white neck clasped in a fist in opposition to the wooden of a cabin conjures fairytales, Dutch nonetheless lifes and Hilma af Klint. Meanwhile, crammed double-spreads of rodents and reptiles, cages and glistening innards, convey a nightmarish, claustrophobic frenzy. She deduced that the hunter’s psyche – a want for prey, the obsession with the trophy – is an apt stand-in for social and political forces punishing marginalised individuals or anti-authoritarian views.
Rozhkova considers Gut Feeling her most essential mission so far and he or she’ll proceed creating it throughout disciplines. It is explicitly an act of protest, and he or she argues powerfully for its universality: “I believe that almost every person has, at some point, experienced that feeling of being caged, a sense of internal tension, or the weight of authority and total control […] Whenever I previously tried to speak about my experience, I realised that people don’t want to confront uncomfortable realities. They prefer to live in their own beautiful, safe worlds, turning a blind eye to political prisoners and pain. Even within the creative community, many just want to produce comfortable projects and make money. Gut Feeling is my refusal to play along.”
Gut Feeling by Kristina Rozhkova is printed by Void and obtainable for pre-order now.