Electric bodies:

Rawan ElSheikh’s

Portraits of

Presence and Pulse

critical review by Gigi Surel

KULTURED GLASS

Rawan ElSheikh

'Movie', 2025.

Electric Bodies.

I first encountered Rawan ElSheikh’s Electric Bodies series at a moment when I was thinking deeply about memory – how we hold it, how we translate it, and how light, as Annie Ernaux writes, can sometimes carry emotion better than words. With an upcoming show of my own circling similar themes, I found myself especially attuned to the magic in Rawan’s photographs: a kind of visual spellwork that doesn’t just document but distills presence.

KULTURED GLASS

Rawan ElSheikh

'Blue dream', 2025.

Electric Bodies.

An artist fueled by radiant optimism, Rawan is a natural storyteller.

KULTURED GLASS

Rawan ElSheikh

'Part of the noise', 2025.

Electric Bodies.

Photography is her primary medium, but her voice – both literal and metaphorical – carries through everything she does. Her lens is gentle but focused, capturing people not as static subjects but as expressive, electric selves.

You may recognise her work from Dazed, among others, but she’s carving out a space far beyond editorial commissions.

KULTURED GLASS

Rawan ElSheikh

'WhatYouCan'tSee', 2025.

Electric Bodies.

This is something else:

a living archive of London’s now.

KULTURED GLASS

Rawan ElSheikh

'All the In Betweens', 2025.

Electric Bodies.

Electric Bodies is an ongoing portrait series rooted in the vibrant, ever-shifting frequencies of London. In a city where cultures, identities, and aesthetics overlap and collide, Rawan’s portraits act as emotional timestamps – moments where the personal becomes almost mythic. ‘Each subject becomes a character – not because they’re performing, but because something in their energy radiates,’ she says.

And it’s true.

These aren’t just poses.

They’re presences – offered to us through the lens of Rawan’s camera, illuminated by the flash like a stage light catching a scene mid-expression, made unforgettable through her practice.

It’s a brief instant elevated into

permanence – a collaborative act of

witnessing and being witnessed.

KULTURED GLASS

Rawan ElSheikh

'Loverboi', 2025.

Electric Bodies.

KULTURED GLASS

Rawan ElSheikh

'Fingerprints', 2025.

Electric Bodies.

What’s refreshing is how Electric Bodies sidesteps the sleek artifice that dominates so much of contemporary visual culture. At a time when identity often feels hyper-performed – curated for screens, polished for perception – Rawan does something quietly radical: she holds space for the real.

Her gift lies in making people feel truly seen. The result is portraits that buzz with self-expression but never tip into performance.

Her subjects aren’t playing to the camera – they’re inhabiting their own space, their own rhythm. There’s no need to manufacture a persona when the person is already enough.

And in a time of algorithmic identity, that kind of presence feels revolutionary.

Take, for example, two portraits from the series – Unapologetic (2025) and Movie (2025). Each image hums with contrast and contradiction.

In Movie, there’s a kind of raw, deliberate stillness – a guarded elegance, as if the subject is both offering and withholding at once.

Meanwhile, Unapologetic blazes with glamour, but beneath the surface, there’s a different kind of intensity – a poise that comes not from performance, but from presence.

KULTURED GLASS

Rawan ElSheikh

'Movie', 2025.

Electric Bodies.

KULTURED GLASS

Rawan ElSheikh

'Unapologetic', 2025.

Electric Bodies.

What Rawan captures so brilliantly in both is not a binary of strength or vulnerability, but the simultaneous truth of both.

In every pose, every glance, you sense the layers:

defiance and softness, pride and uncertainty, radiance and restraint.

How we present and how we are perceived is a theme widely explored in contemporary practices – a conversation that’s constantly evolving across disciplines. In contrast to artists like Anna Uddenberg, whose sculptural figures lean into the exaggerated and the uncanny, Rawan’s images debug the code of the authentic. Uddenberg asks us to linger with the fake; Rawan reminds us that the real is still out there – nuanced, diverse, unfiltered, and luminous. Her work isn’t skeptical of identity, but celebratory of its complexity.

Shot across a range of locations – street corners, living rooms, liminal spaces of the city – the series captures the ritual and resistance of self-expression.

These images tell stories without ever needing to explain themselves.

They’re alive with gesture, color, and light, each frame revealing how identity is something we carry in our bodies before we ever put it into words.

KULTURED GLASS

Rawan ElSheikh

'Strike!', 2025.

Electric Bodies.

As she puts it, Electric Bodies is about ‘how presence speaks before language’.

And in that space – between being and being seen – Rawan ElSheikh is making her mark on visual history.

Electric bodies:

Rawan ElSheikh’s

Portraits of

Presence and Pulse

An artist fueled by radiant optimism, Rawan is a natural storyteller.

This is something else:

a living archive of London’s now.

What’s refreshing is how Electric Bodies sidesteps the sleek artifice that dominates so much of contemporary visual culture. At a time when identity often feels hyper-performed – curated for screens, polished for perception – Rawan does something quietly radical: she holds space for the real.

What Rawan captures so brilliantly in both is not a binary of strength or vulnerability, but the simultaneous truth of both.

In every pose, every glance, you sense the layers:

defiance and softness, pride and uncertainty, radiance and restraint.

Shot across a range of locations – street corners, living rooms, liminal spaces of the city – the series captures the ritual and resistance of self-expression.

These images tell stories without ever needing to explain themselves.

They’re alive with gesture, color, and light, each frame revealing how identity is something we carry in our bodies before we ever put it into words.

As she puts it, Electric Bodies is about ‘how presence speaks before language’.

This is London, right now.

Diverse, electric, unapologetically alive.