NAGOTA
NAGOTA
Photo & Art Project by Adam Ripley (gallery residing artist)
Curated by Anna Galeeva
In collaboration with Diversecity Models and DALLERY.de
With artistic contributions by Caro Gugu, Kristina Tarasova and Daniel Mais
Supported by pjur, a brand for premium intimate products – Made in Germany
Supported by purplehaze | KEYI Magazine | Monopol | TUSH Magazine
“And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”
Genesis 2:25
NAGOTA is a photo and art project by Adam Ripley, realised in Berlin as a TOVA Gallery project. The exhibition brings together photographic works created by Adam over the course of two decades, exploring the naked body in relation to landscape, perception, visibility and natural matter. 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, 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 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. The exhibition is composed of several photographic series, each revealing its own aspect of nakedness. Metamorphosis approaches the exposed body as a return to a pre-civilisational state, a search for the archetypal Adam, free from imposed values. Femina Aliena opens a zone of visual instability, where the female body appears familiar and alien at once, while colour inversion and solarisation make perception itself visible.
Passport Photo expands the official portrait format: the whole naked body becomes the full image of a person, including those zones of presence that usually remain outside recognition. The Nature Series 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.
Within TOVA Gallery’s programme, NAGOTA develops the line of Core-based Art and enters into dialogue with posthuman studies. The human body is not shown as an autonomous or completed entity, but as a mutable form emerging through relations with nature, image, light, surface, technology of perception and regimes of visibility. In this broader field, the human being ceases to be the centre of the visual world and appears as one of its living forms: embedded in landscape, transformed by looking, held between social legibility and the inner work of the gaze.
NAGOTA is a conversation about the body passing through nature, through the image, through visibility and through slow perception. Nature lives in constant metamorphosis; the human belongs to the same movement. Photography fixes this process and opens it again. Nakedness in Adam’s project becomes more than a subject of representation: it becomes a phenomenon, a mode of connection, a return of the body to the world in its full presence.
Zossener Str. 48
10961 Berlin
11–18 June 2026
Opening hours: 13:00–20:00
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