Ksenia Malafeeva is an artist working in photography. Born in Ivanovo, Russia, in 1981, she lives and works between Dubai and Moscow.
She came to photography by way of painting, architecture and art history, and the order matters. Painting gave her a way of treating colour as a subject rather than a property; architecture, the habit of reading a space before reading the objects in it; art history, a sense of how much of what we call seeing is in fact remembering.
Her subject is the distance between what stood in front of the camera and what a viewer later believes they saw. She works with what is close at hand — rooms, gardens, tableware, water, the people she lives with — because familiar things make that distance easiest to measure. Over the past decade the pictures have moved from description toward colour and light held at the edge of recognition, without ever leaving the everyday behind.
Malafeeva was nominated for the Maurice de Mauriac × Photo Basel Award in 2024. Her first monograph, My Ordinary Life, was published by Form Gallery, France, in 2024 in an edition of 100 and has sold out. Her work is held in private collections in France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States. She is represented by Form Gallery, Dinard, France.
Art fairs
2026 Tokyo Gendai, Yokohama — solo presentation
2026 Cosmoscow, Moscow
2026 Unseen × Art Rotterdam, Rotterdam — solo presentation
2025 SCOPE Miami Beach, Miami Art Week
2025 Photo London, Discovery section, London
2025 The Photography Show presented by AIPAD, Park Avenue Armory, New York — solo presentation
2024 SCOPE Miami Beach, Miami Art Week — solo presentation
2024 Photo Basel, NOVUM curated sector, Basel
Exhibitions
2026 Wu Wei, craftnotes gallery, Moscow — group
2024 My Ordinary Life, Form Gallery, France — solo
2024 Convergence, MSK Eastside Gallery, Moscow — group
Awards
2024 Nominee, Maurice de Mauriac × Photo Basel Award
2024 Selected by Annabelle magazine (Switzerland) among women photographers at Photo Basel
Press
Haaretz, “My Ordinary Life”, March 2025
Books
My Ordinary Life, Form Gallery, France, 2024. Edition of 100, sold out.