Kristina Rozhkova’s photobook blurs the boundaries between bodies, species, powers
A man holds a goose: one hand grips its neck; the other pins back its wings. In another image, another pair of hands pulls back a dog’s lips to expose its sharp, white teeth. Elsewhere, live rats are stuffed into a glass jar; the organs of gutted fish spill across a table; a thick metal chain is tightened around a man’s neck and humans suck the toes of other humans. In Kristina Rozhkova’s photobook, images of human and nonhuman bodies rub up against one another – feeding, breeding, hurting, restraining.
As you flip through the pages of this compact publication, the boundary between species blur; however civilised we might imagine ourselves to be, animal instincts remain part of human life. Many of the mixture of black-and-white and colour shots included here are stark and gory scenes of control and vulnerability in their own right. Through their sequencing, however, they acquire a sinister charge. A child’s gappy mouth, new teeth pushing through gleaming pink gums, sits opposite white rodents in a pink metal cage; images of breastfeeding appear alongside calves at udders and industrial milking equipment.
Cages, ropes, traps and harnesses appear throughout, but their meanings keep shifting: a body might be held against its will or it might be engaged in consensual BDSM play. In a short text at the back of the book, Rozhkova recalls growing up around dogs bred by her mother: ‘I loved sitting in a dog crate, feeling it was my own little house.’ A cage can signify shelter as readily as confinement. That distinction became more fraught, we learn, when, in 2024, the photographer was detained following a semi-nude photoshoot at a St Petersburg cemetery, and charged with desecrating burial sites. She spent two months in detention before being transferred to house arrest. Gut Feeling is strongest, though, when the images leave us to negotiate the difference between restraint, comfort, submission and coercion. Violence and control, the photos suggest, is not always legible from a gesture itself; its meaning depends on context, control and choice.
Gut Feeling by Kristina Rozhkova. Void, €50 (hardcover)