In Daria Atamanovskaya’s practice the recurring thread of girlhood functions as a lens through which she dissects contemporary subjectivities and visual culture. Her photographs articulate what Angela McRobbie once termed girlhood and described it as a complex entanglement between femininity, autonomy, and post-feminist cultural production. Atamanovskaya’s gaze is distinctly that of a woman who both performs and interrogates the image of the girl that always aware of the tension between looking and being looked at.
Her photographic series Youth draws directly from the notion of “bedroom culture” a central term for feminist media studies. The bedroom becomes both refuge and stage; a site of self-performance, digital intimacy, and affective labor. Within these intimate, curated interiors, Atamanovskaya’s protagonists negotiate visibility and vulnerability, reflecting the ambivalence of growing up in an image-saturated, networked world. Here, the artist positions the camera as a mirror of self-construction, oscillating between documentation and performance.
Another series Synthetic Souls, AI Detox, and Melting Realities extend this inquiry into the post-digital condition. Through staged tableaux and hybrid aesthetic vocabularies, artist explores Garbers “category crisis”. The instability of boundaries between human and nonhuman, body and machine, natural and artificial. These series question how identity and emotion persist amid algorithmic mediation, proposing an alchemical process of re-humanization. The characters, almost always young women, appear suspended between realities, embodying the desire to reconnect with the sensuous and the organic in an increasingly synthetic environment.
In Muhomor and How to Open a Third Eye, the human merges with fungi, extraterrestrial, and mythic matter. The hybrid female figures evoke the anthropological and the hallucinatory, the sacred and the grotesque. Through these metamorphic images an ecology of femininity that resists categorization is constructed. Here the girl becomes a vessel of transformation, intuition, and psychic expansion.
Across these works, Atamanovskaya maintains a coherent aesthetic and conceptual grammar. Her practice navigates the emotional landscapes of youth, nostalgia, and displacement, but always with a sharp awareness of the politics of representation. Each photograph becomes a fragment of a larger cosmology; an evolving archive of girlhood as both a lived experience and a theoretical proposition. Through her lens, girlhood transforms from the stage to be overcome to a persistent methodology for sensing, imagining, and surviving the contemporary world.
Text: Anna Azens, art historian.
