Loud Sirens of the Caspian Bodies I–IV
Photography, performance and mixed-media installation series, dimensions variable
2019–2022
The series was developed and edited by Agil Abdullayev, with support from drag artist and DJ Christos Gkenoudis, also known as Marika The Alien.
Loud Sirens of the Caspian Bodies I
Live photographic performance and moving image, dimensions variable
2019
Loud Sirens of the Caspian Bodies I introduces Lady Adele Rashida Baghlava, Abdullayev’s drag persona and guide through alternative Azerbaijani histories. First developed as a live photographic performance for an artist friend Christos Gkenoudis , the work unfolds through fragmented images and short moving-image episodes. Lady Adele appears to belong to no fixed time: she moves between an invented past, the present and a speculative future. Borrowing the visual language of social media, tourism and popular entertainment, the work considers how national identity is performed and circulated. Fiction becomes a method for making queer presence visible where historical narratives have left little space for it.
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Loud Sirens of the Caspian Bodies II
Photography, screenprint and wall paint, site-specific installation, dimensions variable
2019
Part II moves Lady Adele from social media imagery into a site-specific photographic installation. Combining photography, screenprinting and wall paint, the work examines how bodies are assigned meaning through gendered expectations, visual conventions and display. Its imagery brings queer self-fashioning into contact with Azerbaijan’s oil economy, allowing glamour, extraction and national prosperity to occupy the same visual field. Lady Adele refuses the role of a stable representative figure; she performs identity as something exaggerated, constructed and continually revised. The installation turns the exhibition wall into a charged surface where private transformation meets the structures that regulate appearance, value and belonging.
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Loud Sirens of the Caspian Bodies III
C-prints and C-print on vinyl installation, dimensions variable
2021
Part III expands Lady Adele’s world into Rashida’s Planet, a destination advertised through the language of tourism. The monumental photographic image presents this imagined territory as both landscape and promotional surface, proposing a future in which queer presence is not hidden but becomes central to how a place represents itself. Yet the promise remains unstable: utopia is packaged as an image, and belonging becomes entangled with branding, spectacle and consumption. By transforming personal fantasy into a public campaign, the work asks who is permitted to embody a nation’s future and how photography can produce spaces that do not yet exist.
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Loud Sirens of the Caspian Bodies IV
Photography and mixed-media installation, dimensions variable
2021-2022
Part IV turns towards Azeri-futurism, using queer speculation to unsettle linear accounts of Azerbaijan’s past and imagined future. Lady Adele becomes less a character than a carrier of possible histories, moving between inherited symbols, digital aesthetics and invented memories. The work does not attempt to restore a complete queer archive. Instead, it constructs one through fiction, allowing absence, fantasy and contradiction to become historical material. Past and future fold into one another, creating a space in which queer life is neither an exception nor an imported narrative. It becomes part of the cultural imagination from which Azerbaijan might be envisioned.
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Photography, performance and mixed-media installation series, dimensions variable
2019–2022
The series was developed and edited by Agil Abdullayev, with support from drag artist and DJ Christos Gkenoudis, also known as Marika The Alien.
Loud Sirens of the Caspian Bodies I
Live photographic performance and moving image, dimensions variable
2019
Loud Sirens of the Caspian Bodies I introduces Lady Adele Rashida Baghlava, Abdullayev’s drag persona and guide through alternative Azerbaijani histories. First developed as a live photographic performance for an artist friend Christos Gkenoudis , the work unfolds through fragmented images and short moving-image episodes. Lady Adele appears to belong to no fixed time: she moves between an invented past, the present and a speculative future. Borrowing the visual language of social media, tourism and popular entertainment, the work considers how national identity is performed and circulated. Fiction becomes a method for making queer presence visible where historical narratives have left little space for it.
Loud Sirens of the Caspian Bodies II
Photography, screenprint and wall paint, site-specific installation, dimensions variable
2019
Part II moves Lady Adele from social media imagery into a site-specific photographic installation. Combining photography, screenprinting and wall paint, the work examines how bodies are assigned meaning through gendered expectations, visual conventions and display. Its imagery brings queer self-fashioning into contact with Azerbaijan’s oil economy, allowing glamour, extraction and national prosperity to occupy the same visual field. Lady Adele refuses the role of a stable representative figure; she performs identity as something exaggerated, constructed and continually revised. The installation turns the exhibition wall into a charged surface where private transformation meets the structures that regulate appearance, value and belonging.
Loud Sirens of the Caspian Bodies III
C-prints and C-print on vinyl installation, dimensions variable
2021
Part III expands Lady Adele’s world into Rashida’s Planet, a destination advertised through the language of tourism. The monumental photographic image presents this imagined territory as both landscape and promotional surface, proposing a future in which queer presence is not hidden but becomes central to how a place represents itself. Yet the promise remains unstable: utopia is packaged as an image, and belonging becomes entangled with branding, spectacle and consumption. By transforming personal fantasy into a public campaign, the work asks who is permitted to embody a nation’s future and how photography can produce spaces that do not yet exist.
Loud Sirens of the Caspian Bodies IV
Photography and mixed-media installation, dimensions variable
2021-2022
Part IV turns towards Azeri-futurism, using queer speculation to unsettle linear accounts of Azerbaijan’s past and imagined future. Lady Adele becomes less a character than a carrier of possible histories, moving between inherited symbols, digital aesthetics and invented memories. The work does not attempt to restore a complete queer archive. Instead, it constructs one through fiction, allowing absence, fantasy and contradiction to become historical material. Past and future fold into one another, creating a space in which queer life is neither an exception nor an imported narrative. It becomes part of the cultural imagination from which Azerbaijan might be envisioned.
