About
“Lo temporal no és més que símbol.”
Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina is an award-winning Russian filmmaker and photographer based in USA, who holds a BFA from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University (2018), and an MFA from the School of Art + Art History + Design, University of Washington (2023). Their work has been exhibited throughout the USA with such highlights as Allouche Gallery (2018, New York City, USA) and Henry Art Gallery (2023, Seattle, USA), as well as Academy Award, BAFTA, and Canadian Award-qualifying film festivals. They have won the Best Narrative Short Film Audience Award at Reeling! Chicago Queer Film Festival for their short film New Flesh for the Old Ceremony in 2021 and screened it at top-tier global festivals such as NewFest and Vancouver Queer Film Festival. For their academic work, Adamska has been awarded the Gonzales Graduate Student Scholarship, and their paper Queer Extremities of the Body Politic is featured at the 2nd Trans Studies International Conference (2024) at the Northwestern College, Evanston, Illinois (USA).
Adamska's artistic work exists in the chasm between two empires — Russia and the United States of America, and their colonial pasts. In their visual work, both photographic and video, Adamska gallops through eras and genres but is constantly preoccupied with unpacking notions of eeriness and nostalgia while transforming flesh with moving images, creating worlds of unbridled desire and disrupting rigid structures of pharmacopornography and cis-heteropatriarchy that are both deeply embedded in the structures of both countries they consider home. As a transgender artist, Adamska is deeply invested in the concept of liminality, they see queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, and their life and work are an attempt at the speculative history of queer utopian world-building. Deeply interested in state-sanctioned surveillance, reactive conformity, and topographic portraiture, Adamska has collaborated with artificial intelligence, performance and textile artists, dancers, and adult performers.
Their visuals hurt so bad but feel so good.
