VITRINE EXHIBITION SERIES
AUG 7 – SEP 7, 2025
Alisha Shimpi
Pilgrimage
Pilgrimage features recent work by artist Alisha Shimpi. The exhibition includes a series of photographs exploring authenticity, intimacy, and identity within a post-documentary practice. Her work questions notions of authenticity, candidness, and veracity by using familiar diaristic approaches of documentary photography in combination with references to the “still life”. The images traverse subjects and experiences within New York City leather and BDSM culture with scenes that oscillate between sharp detail and soft abstraction.
“…Just like how in this lifestyle we play roles to find our authentic selves, I play a documentarian to capture a more authentic narrative.”— Alisha Shimpi
Alisha Shimpi is a multimedia artist who explores authenticity, intimacy, and identity through photography and installation. Her work, often quiet and delicate, interrogates the boundaries of storytelling and representation. Through unreliable narratives and diaristic styles of documentary, Shimpi has examined subjects such as her memory and mental health to leather culture in New York. Her project Pilgrimage uses photography, writing, and sculpture to document her experiences in the BDSM lifestyle in efforts to promote destigmatization. Her work has been featured in exhibitions Thresholds (2024) and Unseen Memory (2022) at The Museum at FIT, and solo show Alisha Shimpi: Pilgrimage (2024) at SS Productions. Shimpi’s upcoming book Common Tongues with Raw Meat Collective publishes later this month.
Artist’s Statement
Pilgrimage began as a personal diary, an attempt to document the early years of my life in the BDSM lifestyle through photographs and polaroids. What started as a way to record my experiences gradually became something deeper: a study of intimacy, identity, and care through a lens I hadn’t expected.
Over the past year, I’ve continued this project while making new work that explores themes of anonymity and self-care. I’ve become increasingly drawn to moments of stillness and subtlety, those quiet in-betweens where power, vulnerability, and connection coexist. In submission, I discovered not only a spiritual clarity but also a deeper confidence in myself and in expressions of femininity that I had once struggled to access.
This work traces the evolution of my relationships, both with others and with myself. BDSM offered me a space to redefine connection, to step into roles that paradoxically brought me closer to my most authentic self. Whether in posed self-portraits or snapshots of partners, I use the role of photographer not to document from a distance but to deepen intimacy. The camera, like the dynamics I explore in these images, becomes a tool for presence and permission.
Pilgrimage doesn’t aim to explain BDSM, nor does it sensationalize it. Instead, it centers quiet forms of care, trust, and attention that are often overlooked. It resists the assumption that intimacy must always be explicit. In these images, some direct and some veiled, I explore how closeness can emerge in shadow as much as in light.