Emma Xhaxho is a Chicago-based artist pursuing her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to print media, painting, sculpture, and fibers.

My practice digs at the complexities of intimacy, power, and violence embedded in navigating womanhood. As a daughter raised by a single mother in a family of daughters, I use sculpture, fibers, printmaking, and painting to dissect the tension between agent and expectation within erotic and social encounters.

I challenge the cultural scripts that equate hesitation with virtue and consumption with conquest through these modes. I reveal the morbidly manipulated rituals of power that demand women’s reluctance to validate men’s desires. My art unearths the painful truth that consent is repeatedly overshadowed by contaminated cultural demands, exposing the delusions of dominance that frame violation as a spectacle rather than a shared connection.

This work is deeply personal, buried in the visceral language of the body, and I reclaim the narrative and unravel the harm ingrained in our collective understanding of sex, intimacy, and womanhood.