je vais pas vous mentir (2025)

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text engraved on aluminium frames and mirrors

70x100x3cm 

existential boner is a personal work exploring obsessions related to the body, identity, and sexuality. Published as a book by SPBH and ECAL in July 2023, it also exists as an installation.

taje is a trans person identifying as non-binary, they began gender-affirming hormone therapy in November 2020, marking the start of an intense process of self-documentation. Every transformation was closely monitored, driven by an urge to reclaim their body and sense of self. Photography became the most immediate tool to record these changes, following the relentless rhythm of their obsessive thoughts.

Through a compilation of images and texts including collages, vernacular photography, studio shoots, snapshots, scans and graffitis, their body of work developed in parallel with their physical and psychological changes. It emphasizes the urgency of emotions and experiences, ultimately constructing a contained chaos as a narrative that offers representation where it was once absent.

Inspired by artists such as Francesca Woodman, Pierre Molinier and Cindy Sherman, taje draw from a lineage of practices and influences that challenge the limits of photography.

This is a short selection of images from the book.

#NoWhereToGo extends reflections on taje’s past work and its connection to censorship. Having previously been a porn performer and filmmaker, they co-founded the collective Oil Productions in 2018. This project engages with the increasing restrictions on sex-positive content online.

Since 2019, content moderation policies on social media platforms has intensified, disproportionately affecting sex workers, particularly women* and non-cis-male creators. While these platforms claim to promote safe content, far-right radical groups and fascism continue to thrive, exposing the contradictions within these systems. Posting explicit images becomes an act of resistance. Through the account @xesx.esxes, they attempt to bypass algorithms by altering content so that graphic elements remain perceptible to the human eye only.

unapologetically sorry is a video performance exploring identity, self-doubt, and desire. AI models were trained on personal archives of intimate images to represents thoughts, disrupting the boundaries between memory and transformation.

no tears, just dreams is a work that was created after the sentence «Make kin not babies» by Donna Haraway.

The series is currently composed of roughly two hundreds images, using all the same combination of techniques. A snapshot of random everyday life moments that is printed, the writing of a laconic sentence from personal diaries on the picture and the scanning of the image completed with the writing to come back to the digital. The visual approach varies from colors, shapes or memories linked to the pictures. The goal is to work in layers, a neverending cycle, to create a survival mechanism.

This scrapbook is an exploration of identity, an ongoing confrontation with past and present selves. Rather than following a traditional narrative, it unfolds in fragments, embracing the fluidity of human existence.

The work interrogates gender as a social construct and a performed identity, following Judith Butler’s theories on gender performativity, and is informed by their lifelong engagement with the negotiation of gender roles. Structured like a diary, it incorporates over a decade of journal writing, creating a space for reflection and self-exploration.

Inspired by Donna Haraway’s concept of string-figures, the project allows for constant re-contextualization, weaving together diverse perspectives. The collage technique mirrors the complexity of human experience, fluid, contradictory, and in perpetual transformation.

Echoing The Separatist Manifesto, the work also addresses the ways in which oppressive structures are re-coded and resisted. It reclaims desire and identity in defiance of the systems that seek to constrain them.