Gut Feeling — Kristina Rozhkova
Gut Feeling is the first collaboration between Russian photographer Kristina Rozhkova and Void, the Athens-based independent publisher. Developed in direct response to Rozhkova's arrest in Russia in June 2024, the book is a sustained inquiry into captivity — its literal conditions, its social structures, and its psychological residue.
"There is an electrifying, if unnerving, energy to Kristina Rozhkova's first collaboration with cult independent publisher Void. Both a protest and a record, 'Gut Feeling' is an unflinching look at what it means to hold something or someone against their will, as well as at their request."
— Amie Corry, AnOther Magazine
In June 2024, Rozhkova was arrested in Russia following a denunciation connected to a photoshoot, held in a pre-trial detention centre, and subsequently placed under house arrest. Confined for two months alongside thirteen women, she produced a body of work that 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 cage: a literal physical condition and a symbolic social order. Rozhkova turns to rabbits and rats confined to small enclosures to develop a stark visual language for incarceration. Human bodies — clashing, hysterical, held captive — are placed in direct relation to animals muzzled, tethered to milking machines, or slaughtered. The work draws on postindustrial factory farms, state institutions, and intimate human relationships as parallel and equally legible sites of control. Drawing on BDSM dialect and the slave-master relationship, Rozhkova interrogates the transformative potential of confinement, tracing the shifting positions between hunter and hunted, ruler and ruled.
"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
This title is part of the Photobooks collection at Lokator100.
About the artist
Kristina Rozhkova (b. 1996, Perm, Russia) works primarily with photography, exploring themes of nostalgia, girlhood, hierarchy, power dynamics, and corporeality. She studied Philosophy at Perm University and graduated from the St. Petersburg Academy of Art and Documentary Photography Fotografika in 2022. Her debut project DACHA received international recognition; it was followed by The Bliss of Girlhood, published by ZONE and exhibited in Bristol, Milan, and Tokyo. Since 2024, her practice has shifted in response to political repression after the extremist anti-feminist group Male State targeted her over a conceptual cemetery photoshoot. Her work has appeared in i-D, Vice, PhotoVogue, Calvert Journal, and Fisheye Magazine.
