American artist K8 Hardy takes over MoMA with “Position Series” (2007-2012), featured in the group exhibition “Taking Back Our Space,” alongside the publication of Positions by MACK, which brings together the fifty photographs of the series for the first time.

Rooted in second-wave feminism’s claim that the female body is a site of political struggle, K8 Hardy transmutes that legacy into a deliberately unruly, genre-defying practice, playing with the codes of pop culture as much as she detonates them. A founding member of the queer feminist collective LTTR, she weaponizes “bad taste” to dissect systems of consumption. Long before Instagram, she was already staging herself to subvert the codes of capitalism and patriarchy. “I love to ruin something nice.”

“Position Series” (2007-2012) grows from that impulse. K8 Hardy mobilizes her sister, mannequins, and her own body — dressed in eccentric clothes, wigs, and makeup — to embody figures that spill beyond any normative categorization of identity and gender expression. Each portrait is printed vertically, in magazine format, by mimicry as much as by subversive intent. MACK gathers the fifty photographs, expanded with unseen images, alongside a text by Brontez Purnell, a leading figure of the American queer literary scene and author of 100 Boyfriends.

In the darkroom, K8 Hardy methodically sabotages her own images: cutting negatives, taping them back together, layering them, deliberately choosing the failed shot. “The interventions become interference,” she says. Everything is aimed at unmasking photography as construction rather than fixed truth, at short-circuiting that moment of belief in an image. “It wasn’t about getting the shot, it was about making it.”

The series’ wardrobe follows the same logic of friction. “I see style as just another tool on my tool belt,” says K8 Hardy, drawing exclusively from thrift stores, never conceding an inch to luxury or designer labels. The looks generate a deliberate dissonance with their settings — a cafeteria, a chain-link fence, a floral armchair — captured across travels through Chile, Texas, Italy, and Argentina. The goal? “Stay common, but peculiar.”

In the lineage of surrealist trailblazer Claude Cahun, of Marianne Wex, who catalogued gendered body language, and of Coco Fusco, performer and critic of colonial representation, K8 Hardy constructs figures that are neither icons nor quite anonymous in their representation. Her model, she says, is “a no one who is someone.” A concept our own era has since caught up with. “Now it’s impossible to look at this series outside the regime of the selfie,” she acknowledges.

The exhibition “Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives” runs at MoMA, New York, through May 2, 2027.

Positions by K8 Hardy is published by MACK , in a limited edition of 1,000 signed copies.