The femme form, as presented in Kristina Shakht’s Taking Space, is both a collaborative agent and motif of impermanence. In a series of images capturing moments of emptiness in nature and in contained water, a visualisation of personal, political, and mythical vacuity shared through a striking portrayal by model and longtime collaborator and creative director, Daphne Laan. The softly-hued, dreamlike images espouse a themeatic subtlety that serves well in more direct reviews of Shakht’s masterful ability to transport. However, through an additional layer of Slavic folk subtextuality, she presents a deeply personal commentary on what it means to exist in a state of liminality, whether imposed or self-embraced. Her deeply intimate experiences with revoked access to her homeland add depth to her concerted mission to present femme existence in ways that challenge collective understandings of the physical and liberation. I spoke with the St. Petersburg-born photographer about reconceptualising placehood in the United States, and the various contexts of fugitivity—both in intimate space and within larger negotiation of local and global identity in today’s political realities.
Kristina Shakht is self-taught, and her capacity as a multidisciplinary visual artist lends to her strengths in creative abstraction. She is powerfully able to address multiple themes and creative approaches while retaining true to a core set of thematic principles. “I was born in Russia,” Kristina reflects, walking me through her multiple iterations of identity. “I lived in the U.S. in Albuquerque until I was four and English was my first language. But then at one point, for many reasons, we went back to Russia when my sister was born for two months to see relatives but we never came back.” The next time Kristina returned to the United States was twenty years later, then an adult and navigating a continual barrage of bureaucratic and immigration barriers so common to the experience of life between statehoods. “I feel like in general I’ve never felt at home there, but also never fully felt at home here.”
In the case of Taking Space, Daphne is as much a physical subject of the form as an applicable receptor of the experience Shakht is speaking to. Both women are immigrants and have had periods of familial separation and grief. Kristina and Daphne would speak together about the various modules of access both in emotional and literal forms. There are loved ones they cannot visit or hold, the grief they haven’t had the space to unpack, and internal reflections they have not had the space or time to adequately release. Having one another, and collaborating in their mutually-facing roles in the project, allowed both women to feel at ease and validated by someone who understood their worlds. “Even though we’re from two different countries, living here [in the United States] we are both familiar with how much energy it all takes out of you, of us.”
The women’s mutual understanding of expatriates—of migration and movement and longing for a home no longer accessible—served as a therapeutic asset that came through in the tangible closeness of the images. The story is visually told, inspired by Slavic mythological themes that underpin much of Kristina’s work, and captures the gothicness of living in a foreign land with emotional balms either inaccessible or revoked entirely. Behind the beautiful images is an almost morbid fairytale of a woman displaced, a child lost, a person existing in a constant state of languishing.
Where the series excels is its harnessing of a storybook-like narrative format that, for those familiar, will evoke traceable cultural motifs, and for those not yet familiar evoke a still relatable tone of unplaced yet visceral nostalgia for a folklife left behind. The communicativeness is made all the more bracing through the thoughtful curation of location and scenery. As an image-maker, Kristina is deeply invested in identifying compelling mise-en-scenes that reflect the tonal weight she offers her viewers and models alike. “Daphne and I were shooting throughout the year and meeting and there are so many beautiful images from different locations that aren’t in the final work,” Kristina says. “For the majority of the time, we were outside and for many of the images, we drove up to this glacier lake in Syracuse. There was absolutely turquoise water, maybe the most beautiful lake on the East Coast.”
Shakht works across many visual forms but Taking Space comes to life as a film-forward still series, shot on the the artist’s Contax T2 and Mamiya 645, among other cameras. Her self-guided approach is bolstered with a studied familiarity with a form that allows her to tonally shift dramatically while making small, practical changes in how she shoots. Once she has identified a visual tonality, she identifies her leads—the people who populate her scenes and communicate her story with their physical presence. In art and practice, Kristina celebrates femme bodies, and how they reflect complex relationships between intimacy, sensuality, self-identity, and liberation. Chief among her creative values is her mission to depict models in settings that validate the dignity of all minds and bodies involved.
Shakht believes in femme-to-femme practice, and given that her subjecthood usually centers on women, she primarily aims to create work that uses the femme body as a vehicle for more interior analysis of women. This makes for a particularly thoughtful dynamic between model and image-maker, hence why the choice here to craft a long-form project around a single individual translates with continuity and clarity. Individual model aside, there is also a subversively feminist gaze in Shakht’s approach to channeling visual textuality by way of the nude female body. The female form operates in, at the very least, a de Beauvoirist interpretation of ambiguity, the embodied and situated subject, and the subject as essentially construed to the surrounding world.
Space, in this project, operated within concerted acts of escape that challenge normative notions of power, ownership, and what it means to be a citizen of a place. There is a weight Shakht carries in her praxis as an image-maker—facilitating safe spaces for interpersonal exchange to conceptualize the breathy, dreamlike imaginary worlds she makes real.
Images Courtesy of the Artist.