Undisclosed, 2024

Building on a practice documenting the world around her and the spaces she inhabits, Undisclosed explores what everyday life looks like as someone living with invisible illness. Katya photographs her body interacting with her surroundings, allowing the body success in its demands for rest. With a hint of humour and absurdity, Katya brings awareness to the large portion of the disabled population that lives with invisible illnesses and disabilities.

This work aims to explore the experiences that Katya and many others who suffer with invisible illnesses and disabilities live through daily, it attempts to photographically document how these struggles present in Katya’s own life, and to represent the ways in which her body exists within the spaces that she uses to live, relax, work, and learn within. In this project she attempts to break down what is understood as ‘the norm’, in terms of bodies and their performance, ability, and mobility; while also contesting ideas of the ‘norm’ within photographic practices, and when this work is on display and in exhibition. This work is also a way of sharing her own understandings of which spaces are accessible or unaccessible, inhabitable or un-inhabitable, especially when taking individual experiences, needs, and abilities into account; starting off with her own experiences in the spaces that she inhabits.