Ebecho Muslimova | Fatebe Sunset Storage | ArtLead Billboard Series

Ebecho Muslimova (°1984, Dagestan, RU) is an artist known for her paintings and works on paper of a character she has called Fatebe. She sees Fatebe as her caricatured alter-ego: the bold, shameless, and permanently naked version of herself. Fatebe is notorious for the comedic situations Muslimova depicts her in, her body twisted into impossible, exaggerated poses. Her nudity and the elasticity of her flesh are always in focus, pulling energetically at her breasts with her hands or exposing her genitalia with widely spread legs. Muslimova consistently uses Fatebe to refuse the body’s limitations and, with this, the formal boundaries of artworks.

For Billboard Series, Muslimova presents FATEBE SUNSET STORAGE (2025), which shows Fatebe bursting out of the billboard, her hands grasped around the frame. It is Fatebe’s first iteration outdoors, in public. Fatebe is naked and bent over on her knees, her vagina stretched open and being pulled even further by her hand and foot. Through it, Muslimova shows us what is in the 019 building inside, with this trompe l’œil effect exposing a storage space filled with stacks of materials, palettes, ladders, and folded-up tables. It is a snapshot of a moment in time for 019, an organization in a constant state of evolution and re-invention, as elastic as Fatebe’s body.

FATEBE SUNSET STORAGE continues a recurring theme in Muslimova’s work of Fatebe’s vagina opening to reveal an enormous object inside, like a piano or a staircase. Despite the potential sexual connotation of Fatebe’s pose, as in many of Muslimova’s paintings, the scenario is cheeky. She looks back over her shoulder and flashes her trademark gleeful smile. The extreme flexibility of her unrelenting naked body becomes detached from eroticism, with Muslimova instead creating a character who is excessively confident in the ludicrous nature of nudity. Fatebe performs for absurd guests, baffled passers-by, and, most importantly, for herself.

In these terms, where Muslimova reclaims nudity from the hands of the male gaze, FATEBE SUNSET STORAGE could also be interpreted as childbirth, with the image moving beyond humor to become symbolic of a kind of maternal power. By using the vagina as the locus of the billboard’s transparency, Muslimova does not just reveal the inside of the building but coaxes it to emerge onto the street.

The power of Fatebe lies in this balance between strength and comedy. For Muslimova the vagina, and the naked female body, do not have to be serious or sexy, they can also be funny, just as the penis has been used by men as a running joke throughout history. Humor is used skilfully, with the punchline of the works sharply funny but easily digestible. In FATEBE BIG FOOT (2017), an ink-on-paper drawing, Muslimova replaces the shoelaces of a shiny, black boot with Fatebe, her arms and legs threaded through the holes. In another drawing, she has morphed into the shape of a chair. Fatebe’s body is malleable and bendy, free to stretch ridiculously beyond the limitations of a human form. The familiar objects that Fatebe interacts with anchor the wild absurdity of the scenarios in which she appears, which can be surreal and dream-like, partially recognizable but mostly bewildering. In FATEBE KETTLE VISION (2024), Fatebes vagina is replaced by a burning red stove with a kettle resting on top of it. Smoke must be moving through her whole body as it comes out of her mouth. Muslimova adapts our daily surroundings to Fatebe’s world, where the rules of real life do not apply.