Maria Kapajeva. from series "Portrait of A Woman (with fired eggs)", 2025

By Loosing Them, I Become a Whole

Maria Kapajeva

Curated by Šelda Puķīte

3.10.2025 — 22.11.2025

Kogo Gallery
Kastani 42, Aparaaditehas,
50410 Tartu, Estonia

To this day, a woman’s body – its pain, illness and lived experience – is often treated as other, constrained by rigid gender norms and medical bias. Rather than embracing the complexity of womanhood, society continues to mystify and objectify women, reducing them to narrowly defined roles. In her solo exhibition By Losing Them, I Become a Whole, Maria Kapajeva draws on her recent physical transformation and ongoing healing process to explore identity politics, womanhood and queer embodiment. It marks the first chapter of a new body of work – one that begins in loss but unfolds through tenderness, resilience and radical self-connection.

Kapajeva inherited the same genetic risk as her late grandmother, who died of cancer at the age of 49 – the same age the artist will reach later this year. As a result, she underwent two preventive surgeries: an oophorectomy and a mastectomy. With the removal of body parts so often defined by patriarchal society as essential to womanhood, she now navigates questions about how these changes might empower her identity as a queer woman – and whether these deeply personal interventions have granted her the chance at a longer life, a future once denied to her grandmother.

Working across photography, video, textiles, ceramics and found objects, the exhibition is at once a case study, a therapeutic process, a tribute to Kapajeva’s grandmother, a farewell to her breasts and ovaries, and an ode to the body she now inhabits. By weaving together physical, visceral and psychological experiences, the artist has created a roadmap for navigating a transitional state of being – learning to mourn, care for and celebrate the body’s evolving form. What begins as a profoundly intimate story opens into a collective experience – one that looks toward a future filled with diverse voices and bodies, sharing stories, raising awareness, and celebrating new ways of being and becoming.

* A reference to Ocean Vuong’s poem Beautiful Short Loser, 2022
** A quotation from Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, 1980

The exhibition is part of the satellite programme of Tallinn Photomonth 2025and serves as Kogo Gallery’s final show of the year, presented under the programme Thrifters and Transformers.

To find out more please go to the direct link.