Ekaterina Perfilieva - In the Daylight
Contemporary culture from dating apps and webcam platforms to pornography and sex products has mechanized intimacy, offering predictability and the illusion of emotional safety. For those shaped by fear of rejection, these technologies promise connection while reducing relationships to mutual satisfaction of needs. As sociologist Eva Illouz notes, we are living in an age of emotional capitalism. Yet despite the freedom to express and pursue desire, emotional distance and alienation persist.
Ekaterina Perfilieva’s In the Daylight project explores this emotional void. Her images present familiar erotic symbols: fragmented bodies, black stockings, white fluids within sterile white spaces, devoid of sensual context. These gestures, emptied of their original meaning, collapse under the harsh, clinical light that exposes the absence of intimacy, connection, and mystery. The visual language reflects the dissociation between sexuality and tenderness, underscoring the loneliness of fantasy-driven desire.
Psychoanalysis shows that sexualization often masks an inner lack — a defense against the anxiety of not being loved. The body becomes a medium for recreating early feelings of safety, yet the Other remains a projection of fantasy, avoiding the unpredictability of real emotional intimacy. Perfilieva’s work captures this melancholic tension, revealing how the pursuit of pleasure often obscures the deeper longing for love.
— Anna Komissarova, psychoanalyst and art critic
Ekaterina Perfilieva is an artist whose work explores themes of emptiness, sterility, and social alienation. Her interests lie in life across post-Soviet territories, decaying and deserted spaces and a sense of loss and displacement from home. She also engages with themes of social alienation, the loss of true intimacy in the modern relationships, and the processes of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
Ekaterina works with mixed media, including documentary and post-documentary photography, installation, video, personal archives, and graphic design.
She was born in Berezniki, Perm Region, Russia in 1988.
Currently lives and works in Ubud, Indonesia.