About

Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina is an award-winning filmmaker, visual artist, and essayist born in Russia and later educated in the UK and the USA. They are currently based in Berlin, Germany, and Seattle, USA.

They hold a BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University (2018), and an MFA from the School of Art + Art History + Design, University of Washington (2023). Adamska's work has been exhibited throughout the USA with such highlights as Allouche Gallery (2018, NYC, 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 (2021) and screened it at top-tier global festivals such as NewFest, Vancouver Queer Film Festival and Wicked Queer. Their essay on gender studies Queer Extremities of the Body Politic, is featured at the 2nd Trans Studies International Conference at Northwestern College (2024, Chicago, USA).

Adamska's artistic work is based on the chasm between two empires — Russia and the United States of America — and their militant pasts and presents. In their visual work, both still 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.

Adamska's work is preoccupied with anxieties about the body and its transformations, following in the footsteps of David Cronenberg, Pedro Almodóvar, Coralie Fargeat, and Jane Schoenbrun — Adamska merges body horror with overtly political messaging, expanding the audience's political imagination through the delightful mutations of the flesh on screen. As a queer 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, they have collaborated with artificial intelligence, textile artists, dancers, and adult performers. Adamska is currently working on the development of their debut feature film. 

Their visuals hurt so bad but feel so good.