Face/Off
Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina

Face/Off is a video art chimera that splices together the folkloric notions of queer monstrosity and documentation of DIY gender-affirming surgeries, trans-people operating on trans-people, in both of these cases taking the face as the arena of both biological and ontological change. Preoccupied with the forensics of monstrosity — ruin, release, and rebirth— Adamska folds in auto-theory through their phrenological experience at the facial surgery consultation, the tentacle-like bureaucratic suffocation of the insurance battle, and an investigation into their doctor. Face/Off takes the late French actor and sex symbol Alain Delon as Patient Zero in this grisly inquiry into transvestite scary monsters and super creeps.  



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Adamska Elizaveta Rakhilkina is an award-winning Russian filmmaker and photographer based between USA and Berlin, who holds a BFA from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University (2018), and an MFA from the School of Art + Art History + Design, University of Washington (2023). Their work has been exhibited throughout the USA with such highlights as Allouche Gallery (2018, New York City, USA) and Henry Art Gallery (2023, 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 in 2021 and screened it at top-tier global festivals such as NewFest and Vancouver Queer Film Festival. Their paper Queer Extremities of the Body Politic is featured at the 2nd Trans Studies International Conference (2024) at the Northwestern College, Evanston, Illinois (USA).



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