NAGOTA

The public programme of NAGOTA extends the exhibition beyond viewing and opens it as a space for encounter, reflection and participation. Across the week, visitors are invited to engage with Adam Ripley’s photographic practice through curatorial introductions, artist presentations, guided reflection sessions, personal photo sessions and live formats developed in dialogue with the project’s central themes: corporeality, visibility, landscape, intim“And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”

Genesis 2:25

NAGOTA brings together photographic works created by Adam over the course of two decades; within them, the human body transforms itself in relation to the landscape. The naked body, upon which the artist’s gaze rests, reunites with nature. The body appears to the world through temporal and spatial transformations, again and again offering the possibility of seeing beauty. The word naked traces back to the Proto-Slavic nagŭ and is connected to the open, uncovered state of the body, to the manifestation of form without an outer covering. From this emerges NAGOTA — nakedness as a form seeking connection and as a continuation of natural matter in human presence. In Adam’s work, NAGOTA is also a reflection on the limits of visibility, on free and declarative visual openness, on the resolve to reveal corporeality, and on a “slipping beauty” in which the beautiful comes into being anew each time through the act of looking.
NAGOTA is composed of several series, each of which reveals its own aspect of nakedness. In the large series Metamorphosis (2019–25), nakedness unfolds as a return of the body to a pre-civilizational state, as a search for the archetypal Adam, free from imposed values; the exposed body passes through loneliness, through closeness to nature, through multiple metamorphoses, and arrives at a point of balance where the person discovers their own perfectly imperfect body. Femina Aliena reveals another aspect of NAGOTA: nakedness enters a zone of visual instability in which the female body appears simultaneously familiar and alien, while the shift from natural color to inversion and color polarization makes the mechanism of perception itself visible — the subject remains the same, the mode of seeing changes, and as a result identity becomes unstable, while the body acquires the quality of a form that is recognized anew. The Passport Photo line introduces nakedness into the field of the expanded portrait: the whole body appears as the full image of a person, as an attempt to push the official format of recognition to its limit and to include those zones of presence that usually remain outside the frame. A separately assembled group of photographs from the series of absolute, pure nature opens a space before the human figure and prepares the moment when the body enters the frame as one of the forms of the landscape. In the dual self-portrait, Adam presents the results of self-exploration and shows that beauty arises in the very act of looking.
Slow looking returns complexity to the body, and to the gaze it returns the capacity to see beauty beyond automatic judgment.
Within a broader theoretical field, NAGOTA comes into contact with posthuman studies, since the human body is conceived in the project not as an autonomous and completed entity, but as a mutable form emerging through relations with nature, the image, the technology of perception, and regimes of visibility. The human being ceases to be the center of the visual world and is revealed as one of its mobile forms — embedded in landscape, in light, in surface, in cultural optics, and in the very process of looking.
In a broader cultural sense, NAGOTA is a conversation about the body as a form passing through nature, through the image, through social legibility, and through the inner work of the gaze. Nature lives in constant metamorphosis; the human belongs to the same movement; photography fixes this process and at the same time opens it anew. For this reason, nakedness in Adam’s project ceases to be only a subject of representation and becomes a phenomenon, a mode of connection, a return of the body to the world in its full presence.

Adam Ripley is a photographer and visual/new media artist born in 1975 in Königsberg. At the center of his artistic practice are corporeality, memory, vulnerability, and self-portraiture. Working with both analogue and digital photography, he explores the relationship of the human being to landscape, light, and inner experience, giving particular attention to the materiality of the image and to slow looking. His biography includes the solo exhibitions We Are Here at the Kaliningrad Museum of the World Ocean (2009) and Exhibits at the Kaliningrad Regional Museum of History and Art (2007), as well as participation in group exhibitions and art fairs including BODY LANDSCAPES at Zimmer48 in Berlin (2026), MIXING IDENTITIES by Itsliquid Group in Venice (2024), Canvas International Art Fair in London (2024), London Contemporary in London (2024), International Art Fair in Rome (2024), ICONIC Photo Show in Milan (2023), Scope Art Fair in collaboration with Wix + See|Me (2015), Art Takes Miami (2011), and the Photobiennale at the State Russian Museum (2009).

acy and the act of looking.

The programme brings together different ways of approaching the body in contemporary visual culture. Some events focus on close looking and perception, while others open a more personal or participatory format, allowing visitors to consider how the body is seen, read and experienced through image, space and presence.

NAGOTA is a photo and art project by Adam Ripley, curated by Anna Galeeva and Yvonne Von Langsdorf.

In collaboration with The Diversecity Models Team
www.diversecitymodels.com

With artistic contributions by Daniel Mais and Kristina Tarasova.

NAGOTA is supported by pjur, a brand for premium intimate products – Made in Germany.
pjur products: www.pjur.com

Venue: Galerie Zimmer48
Zossener Str. 48, 10961 Berlin
www.zimmer48.de