MoMA Magazine
“How Sheree Hovsepian Builds a Body”
Marina Molarsky-Beck
May 18, 2026
Sheree Hovsepian approaches photography as a starting point, not an endpoint. Working almost exclusively with photographs of her sister—a stand-in and proxy—she captures body parts in isolation: an arm, a hand, a curved spine. She then assembles the resulting gelatin silver prints alongside ceramics, nylon, string, and wood, constructing bodies that never quite cohere into a whole. The process is as much about touch and transformation as it is about the camera. On the occasion of these works going on view at MoMA, I visited the artist in her New York studio. Our edited conversation is below.
—Marina Molarsky-Beck, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography
Marina Molarsky-Beck: With Awoken (2018), Rapport, (2024), and Stranger on Display (2024) now on view at MoMA, could you walk us through what we’re seeing, the materials you’re using, and how you might describe them to someone encountering them for the first time?
Sheree Hovsepian: I studied photography in undergrad and grad school, but I never really considered myself a photographer that goes out in the world to shoot pictures. I always felt like my approach to art-making was more of an additive one, thinking about painting or drawing, but also collage or assemblage. All of these elements go into the photographs I make now. I photograph the female figure, which is my sister, and I see her as a stand-in for myself. I view these very loosely as self-portraits. It allows me to be behind the camera and in front of the camera simultaneously. When I’m building the collage works, specifically the ones with ceramics, or wood pieces, and string, I’m thinking about building a body, or constructing a form, a figure, an exquisite corpse, in a way. It resonates as a fragmented self, and an inability to actually know the self. But the elements that I use to build this body are photographs: either figurative photographs, or things that I’ve photographed from around my studio or around my home, that allude to limbs or body parts, or somehow finish the body. I make the ceramic forms in the studio, and there’s this push-pull between very tight formalism and the handmade in my work.
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