What I Desire Doesn't Have a Name Yet

What I Desire Doesn't Have a Name Yet - is a collection of images that explores body image and sexuality

Being originally from Georgia, my work is informed by religious conservatism and how it has shaped representations of female sexuality in the South Caucasus. 

Nudity has been the spine of my visual language since the early days of my artistic career. I have been photographing nudes by focusing on the stories that emerge through gesture, posture, choreography and the blurred lines of the gender binary. 

My work is also a subversion of the moral policing that I experienced as a queer youth growing up in a heterosexist religious society in Tbilisi. Through it I’m hoping to reclaim the space that was denied to me as a woman and as a lesbian. For this, I often find myself as the subject of my own photographic and sculpture work. It is personal but it concerns many. 

What I Desire Doesn't Have a Name Yet - is a collection of images that consists of a few chapters -  it starts as a series of nude portraits photographed during the lockdown in 2020 and is an exploration of my own physicality and identity. The series broadens into a wider theme of representation and sexuality that many of us lacked growing up - it shows the beauty of lesbian relationships in the everyday mundane tenderness that is so often invisible in arts, literature, theater, film. The close up details of bodies challenges the preconception that you can guess a person’s gender by examining their body parts.