Xenia Nikolskaya’s latest photobook explores the sacred kitsch of Coptic iconography

In the baroque quietude of a Coptic church tucked away in Upper Egypt, a faded icon of the Virgin Mary gazes out from behind a veil of plexiglass. Her expression is tender, but her halo is edged with plastic roses—bright, synthetic, defiant. This small image is one of many in Plastic Jesus, the striking new photobook by Russian-Swedish photographer, academic and curator Xenia Nikolskaya. Traversing Egypt from 2006 to 2023, Nikolskaya’s lens captures the intricate, often jarring material language of Coptic Christian devotion: glittering crosses, mass-produced saints, LED-lit altars, and plastic relics suspended in time.

At first glance, the book, designed by Omar Al-Zobi and Amman-based Eyen Design, seems to tread the well-worn path of ethnographic documentation. But Plastic Jesus does something more subversive, and perhaps more tender—it elevates what is often dismissed as kitsch to the realm of icon. This is not merely an aesthetic exercise; it is a visual theology, one that explores the sanctity found in the ordinary, the mass-made, and the gleamingly synthetic.

“My grandfather was an Orthodox priest who spent years in the Gulag,” Nikolskaya shares. “There was no church in the Soviet Union when I was a child, no religion. We had different heroes. But he—he was like one of the early saints, persecuted for his faith. That drew me into the world of Eastern Christianity. When I came to Egypt, Coptic heritage was this exciting rediscovery.”

Nikolskaya does not photograph “faith” in the abstract. “One cannot photograph a faith,” she insists, “but you can photograph the environment and the practice.” And so she has. Each image in Plastic Jesus offers not a voyeuristic glimpse but a kind of liturgical intimacy, a slow unfolding of what Coptic writer and journalist Adam Makary calls “a faith shaped by survival.”

Makary, who authored the photobook’s introduction, frames the work as both deeply personal and powerfully translatable. “For Coptic readers, this is a mirror,” he writes. “And for non-Copts, it’s a window.” The effect is uncanny: Plastic Jesus evokes not simply reverence or curiosity, but estrangement and recognition in equal measure. “I saw things I’d grown up with, but through Xenia’s lens, they felt almost foreign,” Makary reflects. “It stirred memories of my childhood, but also of a faith shaped by survival, and a community that’s always had to adapt.”

Indeed, adaptation is a subtle undercurrent in the book. It chronicles not just icons and relics, but the ways in which a diasporic and marginalised faith makes itself seen and felt in a rapidly changing world. There is a quiet radicalism here, in how these plastic embodiments of Christ, his apostles, and the Virgin endure, untouched by canonical tastes or minimalist trends.

“We so-called intellectuals use ‘kitsch’ as something derogatory,” Nikolskaya notes. “But to many, they are simply beautiful items. Beauty is subjective. People want things done from the point of view they see as beautiful.”

Her photographs are unflinching in their embrace of the devotional absurd: a cross wrapped in gold foil, an altar backlit by flashing neon, an icon whose surface is nearly obscured by laminated prayers and strings of plastic beads. Yet nothing here is ironic. These images are, in their own way, acts of reverence.

Perhaps the book’s most profound contribution lies in its exploration of material theology—the notion that faith does not only live in scriptures and sermons, but in oil-stained walls, in a child’s plastic rosary, in the cracked eyes of a Jesus figurine.

“Our faith has always been material,” Makary explains. “It lives in the oil on your forehead after unction, or the cracked plastic of an icon passed down for decades. There’s no divide between sacred and profane in Coptic life. Faith is something you can touch.”

In this light, Plastic Jesus reads almost like a contemporary museum catalogue—one not curated for prestige, but for preservation. “If a story is not told, it disappears,” Nikolskaya says. But she’s careful to distinguish this work from nostalgia. “This one is different from my earlier books. It’s not academic. It’s not even personal in the same way. The topic dictates the style.”

Makary echoes this complexity. “It’s preservation, yes, but not in a nostalgic way. It’s capturing a tradition mid-transformation. There’s critique here—of capitalism, of migration, of aesthetic dilution. But there’s also celebration: of resilience, of beauty in unlikely places.”

In a global art world that so often flattens Eastern Christian traditions into exotic otherness, Plastic Jesus refuses to play the part. It neither exoticises nor sanitises. Instead, it pulses with something more urgent: an insistence on seeing. Seeing the marginalised, the minor, the material.

“I hope this book invites people to rethink what’s sacred,” Makary says. “Especially in a world where meaning is so often outsourced to algorithms and aesthetics.”

In this sense, Plastic Jesus transcends its own subject. It becomes a meditation on how meaning is made—how rituals endure not in polished marble or gilded chapels, but in the tenacious presence of belief, however humble its frame.

This is a photobook that speaks across differences: between East and West, sacred and secular, old and new. It humbles the art viewer, and dignifies the worshipper. In its quiet images of cracked paint and flickering LED halos, Plastic Jesus asks, with rare grace: What, today, is holy?