Xander Sandwell Kliszynski

Photographic artist examining the cultural guises through which identity is performed — and the visual disguises through which it is imagined and sold.

Practice-led research

Two identical men (digital twins) sitting on a beige couch, one appears to be to be suffering a heart attack, holding his chest, the other is eating a burger. A small table with pizza, beer, and a soda is in front of them.

Xander Sandwell Kliszynski is a photographic artist working through staged and digitally constructed composite photography to examine what cultural scripts of gender cost the people who are required to inhabit them.

His practice operates across two bodies of work. Disguises interrogated the visual machinery through which gendered identities — and particularly commodified femininity — are constructed and circulated. Guises examines the consequences: what happens when those constructions prove inadequate, or when conforming to them comes at too high a personal cost.

Sandwell Kliszynski holds a BA and MA in Photography and is currently completing a PhD by practice at the University of Gloucestershire.