Contributor

Sasha Davai (Alexandra Lapina) was born in 1996 in Yekaterinburg, Russia. After attending Central Saint Martins School of Art, she moved to Jerusalem to study permaculture and communal living. Davai lives and works between London and Jerusalem. Her work navigates urban and natural environments addressing ideas of the nature-culture divide. Using photography as a primary medium, she juxtaposes pictorial beauty with elements of erosion, dereliction, and images of abandoned structures, creating anthropological portraits of places. Some of the projects relate to hybrid documentary photography and test the authenticity of narratives of the subjects portrayed (including projects such as The Graduation, A Brother That I Never Had, and In Search for Domesticity). Interested in the subject-object relationship between humans and nature, many of her works evaluate when and how nature is seen as a product that can be commodified, or a primitive dangerous force that has to be confronted and controlled.