Julie Poly (b. 1988, Kadiivka, Ukraine — now lives and works in Berlin, Germany) is a Ukrainian artist working with photography, installation, publishing, and expanded forms of image-based practice. Her work explores sexuality, gender, and intimacy through a visual language that merges documentary observation with staged exaggeration. Engaging everyday gestures, domestic scenes, and moments of erotic tension, Poly uses vivid color, precise composition, and humor to question who holds power over the body—visually and socially. Drawing from the Kharkiv School of Photography, she reinterprets its legacy through a feminist and embodied lens, reclaiming erotic imagery as a space of agency and self-authored identity.


In 2021, Poly founded Temptress — first and currently the only active erotic art magazine and curatorial platform in Ukraine. Initially focused on contemporary Ukrainian erotic art, it has since grown into an international project engaging artists across geographies through a queer-feminist lens. In 2024, Temptress received the special award at the Arsenal Book Festival.


Julie Poly gained wide recognition in the Ukrainian and international art scenes through her photographic series and book Ukrzaliznytsia (2017–2025). Initiated during her years as a train conductor, the project traces the Ukrainian railway system as a space of blurred boundaries — from shared sleeping compartments and fleeting intimacies to wartime evacuation, medical transport, and forced displacement. In 2025, the continuation of the series was commissioned by RIBBON International and presented in The Stammering Circle, curated by Marta Kuzma at Jam Factory Art Center, Lviv. In 2025 MESEN held her solo exhibition across Oslo Central Station and Drammen Station, in 2023 Poly had a solo show at 4:59 at Fotogalleriett in Oslo. Poly’s work has been exhibited at Futurespective Saatchi Gallery, London (2025); and Spalah. Ukrainian photography today in Kyiv (2022). She has participated in the Riga Photography Biennial (2023), Vizura / Zagreb Biennial (2022), and the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg (2022). She was nominated for the Futures Photography platform by The Calvert Journal and received the LensCulture Emerging Talent Award in 2019.

Contacts

+380632261325
juliepolystudio@gmail.com