Ksenia Nova

'When I came to Britain, I became fascinated by women producing porn and erotica. I started to research sexually-explicit art produced by women from the sixties - in-your-face, radical stuff on female sexual identity by Carolee Schneemann, Valie Export, Judy Chicago, etc.

But their stuff is not just about sex, it’s more about politics, and a form of activism.'

Ksenia Nova creates images of women lost in reverie, caught in muted desire or moments of intense abandonment. Shot in cold, empty, decaying interiors, the photographs have a dream-like feel, resonating with nightmares of being lost and misplaced.

She shows us hidden female vulnerability, those private moments of acute loneliness and melancholy with a tinge of anguish. The subjects are detached, anonymous, often faceless, women. In the absence of a male figure they end up looking incomplete, like used objects or discarded sex toys. The images are both absurd and haunting with unsettling eroticism in the context of surface beauty.

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