Keep Your Hands Off My Meat examines the female body as a place where many forces converge—faith, desire, care, power, and ownership. The series unfolds through large-scale mixed-media works that combine personal images with religious symbols, found materials, and repeated gestures. What emerges is not a narrative, but a sustained pressure.
The work draws from materials that have remained close to the artist: eggs, screws, dolls and children’s toys, ropes, fragments from old magazines, and photographs of her own body. These objects are handled, transferred, eroded, and reassembled. They carry memory through use. Within the work, systems of belief and value do not appear as abstract ideas, but as things that touch, shape, and discipline the body while presenting themselves as care, morality, or protection.
Christian iconography recurs throughout the series—crosses, Madonnas, halos, the language of prayer. These symbols are neither rejected nor celebrated. They are examined as structures that have historically framed obedience, sacrifice, purity, and worth, especially in relation to women’s bodies. Prayer becomes plea. Reverence slips into control.
Barbie appears repeatedly as both image and framework. Flattened, multiplied, crucified, or dismantled, the doll becomes a quiet diagram of idealized femininity—standardized, endlessly reproducible, and emptied of agency. Gold enters the work in raw, uneven forms, evoking both sacred relic and extracted resource. Together, they expose how value is assigned, circulated, and imposed on bodies through systems that confuse devotion with possession.
Language enters unevenly and without hierarchy. Handwritten insults, pleas, fragments of digital messages, and private thoughts accumulate across repeated images of the artist’s own body. These surfaces resemble screens, archives, or evidence boards—places where intimacy is recorded, stored, and misused. The body becomes an index rather than a subject.
Scale is essential. Many works extend across walls, requiring the viewer to move alongside them rather than absorb them at a glance. They recall banners, damaged altarpieces, censored documents, and industrial diagrams. The body is not represented as an image alone—it is constructed, measured, exposed, sanctified, and held in view, bearing the marks of what has acted upon it.
Marina Orlova is a multidisciplinary artist whose work examines the intersections of the body, belief systems, language, and power. Working across large-scale mixed media, collage, drawing, and performance-based video, her practice engages religious iconography, mass media, and autobiographical material to interrogate cultural systems that regulate femininity, autonomy, and value. Her works often stage the body as a contested site, where devotion, control, and self-authorship collide.
Orlova was trained as a philologist and first gained international recognition as the creator of the digital series HotForWords, launched after her move to the United States in 2002. Beginning in 2008, the project examined the origins of language through popular media, reaching over 500 million views worldwide. During this period, Orlova was profiled by The New Yorker, Wired, Bloomberg, Der Spiegel and other international publications, and published HotForWords book with HarperCollins.
Following this public media career, Orlova transitioned fully into visual and performance art, shifting her focus from linguistic explanation to embodied inquiry. Her contemporary practice explores memory, belief, and cultural inheritance, often addressing how systems of meaning—religious, political, and commercial—are inscribed onto bodies from childhood onward.
In 2023, her painting Birthing a Bomb was awarded First Prize at the London Art Biennale.
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The work uses a labor-intensive image-transfer process in which photographic images are deliberately fragmented, eroded, and reassembled by hand. A photograph—often of an egg, doll, or rope—is digitally divided into A4-sized sections, printed, coated in acrylic gel medium, dried, and then physically washed to remove the paper support. What remains is a thin, translucent skin of image. These fragile membranes are reassembled with visible seams, wrinkles, and areas of loss.
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