Abdulhamid Kircher made portraits of Sierra Kiss in her home in Los Angeles, and over the four years they have known each other he documented her experience of homelessness, addiction, repeated pregnancies, and domestic abuse. New Genesis examines how American systems of care repeatedly fail the women and children most dependent on them, tracing a broken support network of shelters, churches, and social services eroded by chronic underfunding and government policy. The photographs record the repetition, exhaustion, and confinement that define daily survival as Kiss fights to create a loving and stable domestic environment for her children, alongside moments of joy and innocence the children find within circumstances structured to limit them.
Made between 2022 and 2025, the project extends Kircher’s exploration of lived trauma shaped by the intersecting violences of capitalism and domestic insecurity. It draws on his ongoing investigation of familial trauma and his own experience as the child of a young mother navigating abuse, highlighting realities that often stem from previous generations and bleed into the next. Interwoven throughout are texts pulled from Kiss’s Instagram stories, offering a parallel testimony and internal monologue of her mental health, isolation, and resolve.
New Genesis is published by Loose Joints in April 2026: 170 x 230 mm, 144 pages, 70 colour and duotone plates, section-sewn clothbound debossed hardcover, texts throughout by Sierra Kiss, edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon, designed by Loose Joints Studio, ISBN 978-1-912719-73-0. A Fundraising Print Edition is also available. Abdulhamid Kircher (b. 1996) was born in Berlin to German and Turkish parents and immigrated with his mother to the United States at the age of eight; he is an artist from Queens, New York. He received his BA in Culture and Media from The New School in 2018 and his MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California San Diego in 2022. His debut monograph Rotting from Within was published by Loose Joints in 2024 on the occasion of his first solo exhibition at carlier | gebauer, and he lives and works between Berlin and New York.
A New York City launch is scheduled for Sunday 19 April 2026, 4–6pm, with Kircher in conversation with Donna Ferrato, co-hosted by Philo Cohen and 99 Canal.
