Ksenia Malafeeva

Ksenia Malafeeva is an emerging contemporary artist working primarily with photography.

Her early engagement with painting, followed by studies in architecture, and later a degree in History of Arts, forms the conceptual and theoretical foundation of her practice. Trained as an art historian, Malafeeva approaches the image through a critical understanding of visual culture, spatial perception, and historical context. This academic grounding is further extended through her education in Contemporary Photography at the Polezreniya school, where she developed a rigorous engagement with the medium’s formal and conceptual possibilities.

From an early age, she has perceived photography as a metaphysical act—an attempt to suspend and transform time, allowing reality to persist beyond its immediate moment through image.

Her practice operates within the expanded field of contemporary photography, engaging with minimalism and abstraction as modes of visual inquiry. Drawing on the intersections of architecture, nature, and environment, Malafeeva constructs images in which spatial boundaries dissolve and reconfigure. Three-dimensional forms are flattened, fragmented, and reassembled into autonomous visual structures that resist straightforward representation.

Her work negotiates the tension between traditional photographic aesthetics and contemporary visual language. Often described as pictorial and atmospheric, her images are marked by a nuanced use of color that evokes a sense of temporal dislocation—simultaneously nostalgic and acutely present—revealing the latent poetics of the everyday.

In 2024, she was nominated for the Photo Basel x Maurice de Mauriac Photo Award. Her works are held in private collections in France, Germany, the United States, and Switzerland. In the same year, she published her first monograph, Ordinary Life, with Form Gallery.

Solo exhibitions

2026, Unseen Rotterdam
2025, The Association of International Photography Art Dealers, New York, Park Armory Avenue
2024, SCOPE Art Fair during Art Basel Miami
2024, Form Gallery, My Ordinary Life

Selected exhibitions

2025, SCOPE Art Fair during Art Basel Miami
2024, Discovery Section, Photo London
2024, Curated NOVUM Sector, Photo Basel
2024, MSK Eastside Gallery

Awards and nominations

2024, Nominee, Maurice de Mauriac x Photo Basel Award
2024, Curated selection of female photographers by Annabelle Magazine (Switzerland)

Publications

Haaretz Press, My Ordinary Life

Books

My Ordinary Life, edition of 100 (sold out)