Gut Feeling by Kristina Rozhkova

Kristina Rozhkova’s new book Gut Feeling is a visceral confrontation with the systems of control overshadowing artistic and cultural production under Russian authorities.

In June 2024 Kristina Rozhkova was arrested in Russia following a denunciation linked to a photoshoot, placed in a detention centre and later put under house arrest. Developed under conditions of incarceration, her latest book Gut Feeling, responds to a cultural climate of enforced state control, one that stifles dissent and attempts to restrict artistic freedom.

At the centre of the work is the site of the cage, both a literal physical condition and a symbolic social order. Turning to rabbits and rats confined to small cages and spaces, the artist develops a stark visual language to trace a lived experience of incarceration. Placed for two months alongside thirteen women in a pre-trail detention unit, bodies become clashing, hysterical animals held captive.

“I won’t look away from my arrest, and I don’t want others to look away as if it’s something 'inconvenient'. I will cast a light on this violence, and show – without giving it a comfortable, consumable form – the unpleasant things I experienced myself” — Kristina Rozhkova

For Rozkhova, the cage is also a psychological state. Through making visible the structures of dependency, control and power that infiltrate everyday life – in postindustrial factory farms, within state institutions, and across our most intimate human relationships – Gut Feeling becomes a corporeal study of legitimate and illegitimate forms of violence. Images of men and women manipulated, tied up and chained, sit alongside animals muzzled, tethered to milking machines, or slaughtered. The work creates space to reflect on the quiet mechanisms of violence that permeate our everyday existence.

In interrogating animalistic states and conditions of captivity, Gut Feeling addresses the ways in which systems of control and dominance can become simultaneous spaces of attachment, desire and lust. Drawing on BDSM dialect and the slave-master relationship, the artist speaks to the transformative potential of the state of confinement, shifting relationships between the hunter and hunted, ruler and ruled. In doing so, Gut Feeling becomes a raw confrontation with realities that are so often avoided.