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I’m interested in how queer communities imagine alternative futures while living under systems shaped by fascism, censorship, and state violence. My work examines how bodies—trans bodies in particular—are policed, surveilled, and medicalized, and how those pressures shape intimacy, desire, and self-presentation. I explore how political trauma repeats across generations, how past and future overlap, and how collective memory becomes material. I’m also focused on queer world-building, the aesthetics of resistance, and the way technology, architecture, and bureaucracy structure our everyday lives. My projects often investigate how people perform, adapt, and mutate in response to oppressive systems, and how those mutations can open space for new forms of belonging.
Country: United States of America (USA)
Webpage: https://adamskaelizavetarakhilkina.com/
Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina is a Russian-American award-winning filmmaker, film educator, visual artist, and essayist. They are currently based in Berlin. They hold a BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and an MFA from the School of Art + Art History + Design, University of Washington. Adamska's work has been exhibited throughout the USA with such highlights as Allouche Gallery (NYC, USA) and Henry Art Gallery (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 and screened it at top-tier global festivals such as NewFest, Vancouver Queer Film Festival and Wicked Queer. Their upcoming short film No Refunds has been screened at Sinema Transtopia (Berlin) and is represented by RAINA Films film festival distribution company. Their essay on gender studies Can Love Bloom on the Battlefield? Queer Extremities of the Body Politic, is featured at the 2nd Trans Studies International Conference at Northwestern College (Chicago, USA). And their essay Face/Off has been included in the Men and Masculinity studies conference at Stockholm University (Sweden). Adamska's art practice is a speculative history of queer utopian world-building where empathy and anarchy meet, and then make out. Their work exists in the intersection of bodily tranformations under fascistic histories, following in the footsteps of David Cronenberg, Pedro Almodóvar, Derek Jarman, and Catherine Breillat — Adamska merges body horror with overtly political messaging, expanding the audience's political imagination through the delightful mutations of the flesh on screen. 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.
Tomorrow Was War, inspired by the director’s own detention, unspools on a fraught New Year’s...
