Passion Play: Tali Lennox and Betony Vernon In Conversation

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photography by Jesper D. Lund
styling by Nayeli De Alba

Tali Lennox’s paintings are rife with a rare erotic power that is both gothic and cadaverous. Desire becomes a tenuous dance between the oneiric and the folkloric; a passion play of spiritual autopsy and resurrection. Alongside jewelry designer and sexologist, Betony Vernon, Lennox dismantles the psychic fractures embedded in her paintings.

TALI LENNOX: The first time I met you was over ten years ago, in a spa in the mountains of Switzerland. There was a big jacuzzi, filled with people floating around you. You looked like a high priestess. It was so vivid—so amazing—to see how captivated everyone was by your words; topics we don’t often get to be open about, like desire. Things we can carry a lot of shame around.

BETONY VERNON: As you tell the story, I see the steam rising and the beautiful faces and the intimacy, that hot water and this sort of back-to-the-mother environment. I remember there was a dividing wall and we could see through to the outside and everything was covered with snow. It was a very improvised situation. It was magical because everyone in the hot tub was at least 25 years my junior, and you were all so eager to talk about desire, to talk about love, to talk about sex. There's not many occasions that arise in the world to have that kind of opportunity. For me, it was equally a moving opportunity because I work one-on-one and I rarely have access to groups like that.

LENNOX: I'm the same as well. I find that I don't socialize that much because I'm always looking for things that go into the depths, you know? And the people I keep in contact with, like yourself, and also with my paintings, it's this opportunity to peel back the psyche and step into the abyss of a place that holds fears and desires; openings and ruptures. It was really powerful to see how people open up in your presence. That's the communication that I really gravitate towards.

VERNON: When you and I first met, you were just beginning to paint. You were actually pursuing it as a career, which is daunting. It's one of the most important and hardest jobs to do. This subject of desire is daunting. It bonds us and it drives us when we speak of desire. What happens when you can’t paint, Tali?

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LENNOX: It’s not a good feeling—I lose my sense of identity when I haven’t been painting. It’s my connection to myself. Having role models and influences is wonderful, but it takes time—especially as a woman—to feel like you can give yourself permission to build your own realm and follow your bliss, as Joseph Campbell said. You, however, are such a polymath. I often find myself speaking to myself in a limiting way, but something I’m working toward now is expanding my realms—exploring all the senses more fully. That also means letting go of guilt and not second-guessing myself. I wonder, how have you cultivated the conviction and focus to speak so openly about topics that so often hold us back—especially sexuality—without shame? And how have you managed to pursue so many passions without hesitation?

VERNON: Pleasure and desire are like sisters, no? We desire things because we think they're going to bring us pleasure. We are born to live in a place of pleasure yet in a society that is very much against it. It is so empowering when you shed your guilt. That's what I'm here on the planet to do: shedding and dismantling the taboo, which means dismantling the shame and the guilt around something that I personally was never told was wrong—not because I had perfect parents but because they pretty much weren't there. This lack of parental control and parental guidance let me bloom into my persona without shame and guilt, which I think is a really rare and privileged position to be in.

LENNOX: For me, with a lot of my paintings, they are about ruptures. I've been painting a lot of volcanoes lately to kind of symbolize this breakage that we have. That also comes with this feeling of release, euphoria, almost orgasmic, and through something that causes us to have a dismantling of self. Do you feel like for us to break through the debris that we hold onto, whether it be shame or outside voices, that you need a spiritual or psychological rupture to access that point? Or do you encourage the more gentle way?

VERNON: I am gentle, but the work is disruptive. Especially when I'm doing body work and healing work. It is breakthrough work. The people that come to me, they've often sought in many places to have a safe place to talk about their desires and have not found it because there's not many spaces. Breakthrough after someone's done a lot of therapy is where I work. I work with people who've really been on a quest. 80% of the people that I work with were victims of trauma, were victims of inappropriate sexual desire. Abuse is overstepping the line and often in the stage of life where we don't even know what the word consent means.

Whether you like it or not, we tend to be handed a big old suitcase full of other people's stuff. We are born like the empty canvas that you find yourself in front of. And then people put all sorts of things onto us that are not ours, but we realize it later, especially if we get to meet someone who makes us see things. Old ideas, limiting beliefs, those things hold you back until you meet someone who says to you, “Hey, it's okay. It's totally normal.” Now, I really feel like I'm in an awkward position because I believe that with the current state of affairs, we find ourselves fighting for things that we fought for many decades ago. We cannot sit on our laurels. Look at what happened in the United States with the dismantling of Roe vs. Wade. Because of the shame, desire today really does demand a safe space that is not censored. Sometimes I think, Are we back in Queen Victoria's era? It’s really disturbing. My work has only just begun. I'm not going to give up on anybody or anything.

LENNOX: The world is moving in a potentially extremely frightening direction. I don't know if I connect to what our idea of modernity is at the moment. There's not much I feel I can hold onto.  So what I've kind of quietly decided is to build a very small orb for myself that has a space for beauty and pleasures and fantasy and history.  Sometimes I wonder, am I stepping out of reality? If I don’t see myself firmly in the world, then what world are we in?

VERNON: You are the future. We have to pass through this disaster, this situation. It means that we're coming through. Breaking through is sometimes painful, but I think that we have to go through it. In these absurd times, by constructing that bubble, you also construct your community. There are a lot of people that see it like you and I do. Beauty and love always win.

LENNOX: And kindness.

VERNON Yes. Kindness and gentleness and, and keeping your value system in place. I don't want to go on about covid too much, but I think about the generalized trauma that it created. We are designed to hold each other, to desire each other and to dream and to connect with each other. And covid didn’t let that happen.We were told not to be near our loved ones and that having sex was dangerous, and breathing on each other was dangerous. It was a global trauma that involved eight billion people. In general, people don't really know how to process it. To process trauma, you need someone to help you. The comfort zone is missing. So making our bubbles is crucial.

LENNOX: During covid, I had a lot of thoughts about desire in the sense of Buddhist philosophy: a certain type of desire being the cause of spiritual inflammation or suffering. I was celibate for about a year and extracted so much. I really leaned into a place of nature and solitude. With my painting, I'm already in solitude a lot. I kept thinking about how the more that I started to extract things from my past, including sexual relations, I felt so much more back in tune with myself spiritually. I realized that my paintings aren't about desire, but I've been painting what I desire. When I was younger, I was quite adventurous, and I would do a lot of alternative healing methods involving very strong psychotropic and psychedelic substances. When you're young, you just hurl yourself into experience. I was craving a feeling of breakage, euphoria, and ripping through the veil. Now I notice with my personal life, I'm quite gentle and peaceful, but my paintings always have this intensity.

VERNON: Maybe they’ve come to this place because of the psychedelics. I think everybody should do psychedelics. They’re a very fast route to realizing that you're part of a big, single giant vibration. I think it would really change the world if there could be a moment where everyone was given a microdose of something to get a reality check.

LENNOX: Some macrodoses too.

VERNON: And some macrodoses [laughs]. Where you are today, in a space of not having the void, it was the work you've done. It's the meditation, it's the psychedelic experiences, and it's all the things that I also did and would do again and again, if the environment is right. There are ways to connect on a higher plane.

LENNOX: Every single decision that we make for ourselves, we're really just led by euphoria.

VERNON: It can push you to do things that you wouldn't otherwise do. The more frightful thing is when you have no more desire because it’s dead. That can be a very dark place, and it's a very painful place. To be wanted is so beautiful and physical and spiritual. The important thing is that it's reciprocated.

LENNOX: When you've had people come to you for guidance on how to either fulfill a desire or just reignite a feeling of desire or a feeling of sharing love with somebody else, do you have what you feel is a universal truth that can help people meet that place within themselves and summon the feeling where love and desire kind of go hand-in-hand?

VERNON: We need desire before we can actually love someone. I've had people say to me, particularly women, “I can't have sex with somebody unless I'm in love with them.” But that's so backwards because often we have sex with someone and then we fall in love with them, not before. I always encourage people to connect and make love if the desire is there. It's so magical and really quite rare that you actually desire someone. If you just go have sex with someone but maybe not desire them specifically, it's never a very good experience. But when you desire someone that’s when magic happens.

In terms of rekindling, I think it is just a question of going back to where it all started and really recognizing the rarity and the specialness of that connection. I say to [my clients], count how many times on your hand that you fell in love with someone. It doesn't happen every day. We can love every day, and we can even love someone first for one night. The key, in the end, is really self-love. To love yourself first prevents a lot of pain and mistakes in the end because you demand respect for yourself. I always say to my clients, please don't use the word single. It's so lonely. Use the word multiple or free. Take it back to freedom and be multiple.

LENNOX: I love the work that you've created with vessels and objects of worship. I love painting objects of worship, and I love the thought that a material thing can help us access caves within ourselves. With your jewelry, it’s interesting how an object can translate so much to people and invite them in. I’d love to know more about how you bring eroticism in through material objects.

VERNON: The objects are like portals to enhance pleasure. I've had people say to me, “When I put on one of your pieces, I feel strong. I feel like I had something that I couldn't actually have if I didn't have the piece.” In other words, it's a prosthetic. This piece is used for pleasing a man. But it's also for pleasing me because I like the way it looked. I like the fact that the pieces make you feel courageous and empowered. That makes you more receptive and open.

There's an element of play also. They become portals to communication, which is one of the things that we all need to work on and that our society doesn't really teach. They don't teach you how to build a relationship. They don't teach you how to parent. They don't teach you how to love each other. They don't teach you how to communicate. [We should] think about the way that we are teaching children today because all of those things are critical, and they're all the foundation of emotional intelligence. Without it, this kind of thing that we're living currently is going to happen.

And then, they are actually objects of ritual. When you decide that you're going to use the pieces, especially the ones that are more explicitly jewelry for the inside of the body, then it requires a ritual mindset. Ritual for me is what can easily culminate desire, just through the act of preparing a ritual. It sets the stage for that soothing of the desires because you can make them come alive. I think fantasy is so important. Your work is also fantasy. Everything you do is dripping and wet. They're like portals that allow us to sort of overcome the doldrums of everyday penetrative sex, which for me is really boring. I wanna play with you. I wanna set a stage and let things unfold in a way that is in a bubble and that is far away from reality and that does remove me from reality. I have no shame in that whatsoever.

LENNOX: More and more I also feel less guilt being on a path of wanting to seek as much beauty and aesthetic enjoyment as I can.

VERNON: I'm waiting for you.

LENNOX: I know you are. I’m building my first headquarters space in this historical relic I found in Paris. I’ve been thinking about different ways I can open up my work in this sense. I have been thinking about making erotic short films, like art films. I think that's something I might do in this space because it's so special. There's one room that's really small, almost like a boudoir, and the walls are really dark red velvet with 19th-century purple frescoes with cherubs. Very indulgent. We actually think it probably was a room for sexual encounters because originally it was the entertainment floor. So I think it could be the perfect stage to experiment with perhaps making films that don't need to be overtly sexual but just allow one to access that portal more. I have a lot of conviction in the fact that I don’t find eroticism in pornography. There's not much to hold onto.

VERNON: I want to make sure you understand that the erotic is the opposite of porn. Porn is male gaze, and it commodifies eroticism. It objectifies the erotic. It disassociates us whereas eroticism associates us with ourselves and others. We are suffering this moment with a rise in erectile dysfunction in men due to disassociation because of porn. It takes us out of reality. It's so disassociating, which is also what trauma does. We have to be very clear about what the erotic is. It is a female power and a source which has been vilified. You focus on the erotic. It's funny because these words have been used in a sort of sex positive way. But one of my goals throughout the past thirty years has also been to change the language that we use around the erotic and around the sexual. When people say things like, “It's a naughty pleasure.” I was like, “No, it's not naughty. Why is it naughty?” Because you're enjoying yourself? That is so Victorian.

LENNOX: It's so common. I often giggle and kind of blush when I speak about these things.

VERNON: Because I also work around sexual trauma, I'm often uprooting shame. Once you uproot the shame, you can uproot the guilt and, little by little, the fears that are put around our sexuality. One of the things that I meditated on a lot during Covid was why has our sexuality been placed in such a vilified space, especially female sex. It’s portrayed as the opposite power to a man's sexuality. It’s a time when we have to protect our male friends because they're a bit lost and fragile.

LENNOX: I agree, and I think there’s been so much fast change and expectations of people deconditioning unfortunate but very true moral codes that have been going on for such a long time. I think for men, it can be extremely confusing in the Western world.

VERNON: Also pretty much everywhere else. We have ideas about the ancient arts, for example, The Tao of the Loving Couple or Tantra, which are being commodified at the moment. It's an alternative. It's a more positive conversation around sexuality. But that doesn't mean that Hindi women have more rights. It's an illusion. We are in a position where we must activate our rights.  I was thinking why has [our sexuality] been taken away from us? Why has the erotic been vilified? And I came to understand during Covid, the flat out answer to the question is because it makes you powerful. You are in your body.

LENNOX: Exactly. It’s very scary to people.

VERNON: You are really you in the end. You've emptied your suitcase of everybody else's bullshit. Now just be yourself. If you're in that first space of self love, you can love the entire world and you can love a man for one night and you can operate in a loving place. It makes you very powerful. This is why they've taken it from you because they would prefer that you were not powerful.

We wouldn't be sitting here having these conversations about how we're about to lose our rights. I will stand by you. I will stand by everyone because I believe that sexual rights are basic human rights. Like having a safe space to sleep, food to eat, a place to be warm, a place where you can express love. Environment is everything, and this is what is really important in this moment where no one feels safe.

We really don't know where we are heading. I believe that there will always be like two sides of the train track. So you just keep on your track. Whatever happens on the dystopic side – the more that you've solidified your bubble and the more that your ambience is created as you're getting ready to create your own temple, your own sweet, special headquarters – you just cultivate that and it'll be just fine.

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Tali Lennox, Heavenly Desserts, 2023.
Oil on linen, 24 0h x 18.0w in / 61.0h x 46.0w cm.
Courtesy of the artist and Nocodim. Photo by Yubo Dong / of studio photography

Tali Lennox, Belladonna 2023.
Oil on linen, 63.0h x 51.0w in / 161.0h x 130.0w cm
Courtesy of the artist and Nocodim. Photo by Yubo Dong / of studio photography

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LENNOX: Thank you for the encouragement. Speaking to you instantly allows me to return to my essence. I'm also curious about Eden, with your boudoir project. Do you have a thought on the religious myth of Adam and Eve and Eden? I'm curious about if you have thoughts on that because the erotic throughout art and religion and history is so fascinating and also such a contradiction.

VERNON: In the beginning, I committed entirely to my erotic collection, discontinuing the 2,000 designs I had created between 1990 and 2000—a decision that cost me many clients who balked at selling massage rings, silver dildos, and more. I named the collection Paradise Found, a play on Yeats’ Paradise Lost. By 2007, I was searching for a property in Paris to bring my vision of Eden to life—an immersive, experiential space. I had precise criteria, and when I visited what would become Eden, Paris, something clicked. That night, on a whim, I opened Paradise Lost and turned to the passage where Satan flies over the gates of Eden. The space I had just seen—near Place des Vosges, with a grand door, a gate, and an inner garden—felt like fate. It was also right by the Bastille, where the angel atop the column is actually Lucifer, the fallen angel—another serendipitous connection. I embraced the idea fully. The Garden of Eden is always next to heavenly places, and for me, sexuality—when approached with deep respect—is a path to the higher self, much like psychedelics are for you. When we tap into the body’s natural pharmacy through the right connections, we unlock something profound—something far beyond everyday life. Sex is spiritual. We enter each other’s personal space, auras, and bodies. To deny its power is to misunderstand its depth.

LENNOX: I love Paradise Found because it’s so uplifting and optimistic. It’s not a heavy title. It’s not darkened, although I like duality and I love the dark too. I keep going back to the word ‘euphoric.’ It’s so nice that you encourage exploration in an enlightened, uplifting, sophisticated, mature way. It just dissolves these boundaries. Happiness dissolves guilt. That’s the boundary I know I have to work on in life: guilt. I was speaking about it with my dad lately because he said, “God, I really passed it on to you.” That's also why I think art is such an interesting way for people to be able to enjoy the erotic throughout time. In the past centuries, you couldn't show ankles in paintings. However, the women also never had hair and it wasn't quite realistic. It’s interesting how looking at paintings was one of the only ways people could enjoy eroticism in a public space.

VERNON: Even in the church. If you think about the way that Eve is portrayed, Mary Magdalene is portrayed, even in Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, she is in the throes of orgasm. You and I know that at the moment of orgasm, you are not here; you have gone someplace else. It's a different brainwave frequency. The brainwave frequency that is being emitted when you have an orgasm is the same frequency that is emitted when you are doing very advanced forms of yoga or meditation. It's not concerned with the day-to-day. So, our spaces must be like temples. You walk in the door, the stage is set, and the rest is history. We fulfill our desires through our environments. You don’t need anything else, the rest is cherry on the cake.

Mia Khalifa

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Avatar, muse, model, activist, influencer, crush, object of desire, and subject of relentless fascination, Mia Khalifa, whose real name is Sarah Joe Chamoun, has always navigated the delicate space between the zeitgeist and an inescapable paradox. As an icon of desire, she has become a holographic projection of society’s deepest anxieties surrounding race, power, beauty, and female bodily autonomy. As a figure of fascination, she has channeled her immense social influence to boldly confront human rights abuses, political repression, cultural stereotyping, and the exploitation inherent in the adult entertainment industry. In 2023, Khalifa was invited to speak at the Oxford Union–one of the world’s most esteemed platforms, founded in 1823–where she engaged in a powerful discourse on reclaiming her narrative, shifting the conversation from objectification to empowerment. Born in Beirut in 1993 and raised in a conservative Christian household, Mia Khalifa’s understanding of shame and politicized sexuality is profoundly shaped by her own tumultuous journey. Her perspectives are not just personal–they are forged in the crucible of cultural conflict, navigating the intersection of religious conservatism and the fiercely contested terrain of self-determination and sexual expression. In 2023, alongside Sara Burn, a former Virgil Abloom collaborator, Khalifa started the jewelry label, Sheytan (Arabic word for devil). In the following interview, Khalifa and Burn discuss navigating public and private persona, desire as a multi-faceted force beyond sex, and creative legacy.

Interview by Sara Burn
Photographs by Nick Sethi

SARA BURN: This issue revolves around the subject of "desire." I'm interested in the concept and your thoughts on desire. How would you define desire? Is it primarily physical, emotional, intellectual, or something else entirely?

MIA KHALIFA: I think it's everything. I believe desire is—you can't do anything in life without it. It's a big driving force. It's synonymous with having a drive. But there’s also a desire to accomplish something, reach a milestone, or create something. It's definitely not just a sexual thing.

BURN: Yeah. I agree. Are there any films or music that really capture the essence of desire in a way that resonates with you personally?

KHALIFA: I don't know if it resonates with me personally, but I, Tonya, is very much about desire. So are movies like In the Mood for Love, Brokeback Mountain, and even The Dark Knight Rises. All of those movies portray multifaceted aspects of desire.

BURN: What I love about Ang Lee, Craig Gillespie, David Cronenberg, Gaspar Noe, and Lynch even, is their work often explores the darker, more complex aspects of desire. I guess there's a refusal to sanitize desire in those movies. I wonder if there's a particular scene that you felt really stayed with you because it captures something that's uncomfortably true about the nature of wanting.

KHALIFA: In The Dark Night, there was a scene with two ferries—one carrying civilians and the other transporting prisoners—both are rigged with explosives. Each boat has a detonator that can blow up the other, and the Joker gives them a choice: if one boat destroys the other by midnight, that boat will be spared; otherwise, he will detonate both. It was a moral dilemma. But the tension is just as high in a moment like that as in Brokeback Mountain before everything builds up to where they accomplish what they want. I think the two characters in Brokeback Mountain are interesting because one of them really understands his desire and his own want.

BURN: And the other one has never been faced with it before. It's brand new, which is, I guess that's what makes that so charged and powerful that there's almost an imbalance, but a complete equal to their want, if that makes sense.

KHALIFA: Totally.

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BURN: I like seeing portrayals of desire that aren't pretty or convenient. It doesn't have to be this beautiful scripted thing. In that sense, it doesn't necessarily have to follow the rules. Are there any films or scenes that you find especially powerful in the portrayal of longing or obsession?

KHALIFA: Let's see. Oh, my God, there's so many…

BURN: … It's so hard to be put on the spot because immediately everything swims into one big soup.

KHALIFA: Exactly. What movie doesn't have a dramatic element of obsession? So, at that point, you're just asking me my favorite dramatic scene in a film.

BURN: I know we've discussed this before: the Phantom Thread, the most romantic portrayal of utter devotion.

KHALIFA: Yeah, that and American Psycho. So many come to mind. It's very hard just to pick one because, at the end of the day, that's what everything is about. I don't think there's a good film or good piece of art in history that doesn't reflect a form of desire in a way.

BURN: We recently saw Vanessa Raw's works at the Rubell. I found them really powerful, not only in terms of the scale of the works but also of the subject matter. I don't think I've seen unfiltered female desire portrayed in that way before.

KHALIFA: I mean, there was so much for your eyes to take in. The size of them and the amount of detail that's in them, you really, really get lost. What's happening in the paintings is the last thing you notice. You really feel like you're stepping into a universe. Many of the paintings depict the jungle or wilderness, so it almost feels like you are in some kind of atrium within the museum. It feels like you've stepped into a courtyard, and you're taking in all of nature, and then you realize, Oh, my gosh, these women are unapologetically expressing their desire for each other. It's really, really beautiful. Her art is so layered, and the sensuality is one of the last things you notice.

BURN: Yeah, you're so right.

KHALIFA: I love the way that it was laid out, specifically in that room. There's enough space to feel like a breath of fresh air. It also feels like it's an intimate corner of her mind. There's one piece that wraps around you. She has thought about the subject enough to make a room full of art depicting desire in as many different ways as she can, and that's so beautiful. The desire shines through on every level: the desire to connect with nature, the desire to connect with women, and the desire to connect with yourself. There are women touching themselves in the paintings, even if they're not specifically part of the main scene. It's so amazing. I love her work so much.

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BURN: Do you think there are any aspects of desire that you feel are unrepresented in contemporary culture?

KHALIFA: We talk a lot about how things were better back in the day, but that's something very nice about living in this day and age. I feel like so many different facets of desire are much better represented than before. It grows more and more every day. I love that I don't feel I have anything new to add. I have something to contribute to something that I already feel a part of, which is great to feel that way.

BURN: Yeah, I think it's also that level of acceptance—the nuance of different people's reality of what they find desirable or is publicly accepted. I think that's really refreshing. You don't need to hide anything in brown paper bags any longer. You can put it on the internet.

KHALIFA: Yeah, exactly. And it's totally fine.

BURN: You're quite unusual in that you work predominantly alone without a team, a PR, a publicist, or the typical entourage that surrounds public figures of your caliber. You create the majority of your content yourself. Is this independence a conscious choice to maintain complete control of your narrative?

KHALIFA: Yeah, I think the idea of personal narrative makes it hard to bring anyone else into the process because it’s just that—personal. Your story is yours, your choices are yours, and what you share is entirely up to you. There’s no one saying, “You should do more of this” or “Maybe don’t say that.” Not having a traditional team, to quote David Lynch, gives us a lot of opportunities to go dreamy—which means we end up on a lot of creative sidequests. Spiritually, it’s been incredible. Financially… not so much!

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BURN: Your success is built from the fact that you're not answering to anybody, and you don't have an agenda as such.

KHALIFA: That's exactly it.

BURN: Most people in the public eye that have your level of platform have an agenda.

KHALIFA: Yeah, they're much more of a commercial vessel than I am. And it's not that I don't want to be. That's why it's a little difficult to answer that question because that's been a goal of ours to get there. I would totally be up for having a global agent; I want to work in scripted and non-scripted media and branch out.

BURN: It's unusual to have your caliber of engaged audience and audience who desire your image and thoughts. Your visibility is unique. It's quite easy to put lots of people in boxes. You don't really have a specific category—other than being 100% honest.

KHALIFA: To quote Tina Fey, “Authenticity is dangerous and expensive.” You have to learn to shut your fucking mouth.

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BURN: Having millions of people regularly engage with your work creates an experience few will ever know. How has your understanding of what it means to be seen changed over time? Has this awareness of your audience become integrated into your creative process, or do you find ways to create from a space that feels separate from the public gaze?

KHALIFA: Completely. I've opened my mind and my world. I know where I want my visibility to be and how I want to be seen; it makes it a lot easier to deal with the anxiety of not wanting to be perceived. I feel like I'm creating more outside of the public gaze than I am for the public gaze. The different creative areas I've been welcomed into that I otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to are very empowering and very validating.

BURN: Anything specific?

KHALIFA: There are just different subcultures and different types of people, like Linder Sterling and Sofia Prantara, all of the people you've introduced me to, and the types of art you've shown me.

BURN: I guess what I'm trying to ask in this question is, how has your understanding of what it means to be seen changed over time? You've always been seen. You know you've got an audience, a captive audience.

KHALIFA: What's changed is my relationship to it. My relationship to being seen is a lot less a relationship of recoil and discomfort. I've produced and done a lot of work that I'm really proud of. I have experienced firsthand so many people coming up to me, and that being the first thing they mention, or what they know me from, or how they were exposed to me. And so my relationship with being seen is not one where I'm constantly battling with shame.

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BURN: Your work moves fluidly between pin-up and intellectual depth, two qualities society often sees as mutually exclusive. How do you navigate this duality in your creative expression?

KHALIFA: I don't really navigate it. I think it's just inherent and a part of it. I feel like everything that I have control over has a touch of both or one or the other. It's not something that I think about. In my creativity, the intellect comes across as the creativity, inspiration, references, and the little cherries on top.

BURN: Do you make images that you never share? Do you create work that's just for yourself without any intention of anyone seeing it?

KHALIFA: Yeah, I did that Loewe and flower set of images, and I wasn't even planning on ever selling it. I was sitting on it for a month before I even showed it to you, and you were like, “Oh, my god, you need to share this.” Then I still sat on it for a year and still never shared it. I just took a couple of pictures in the mirror really quickly. There was no planning. I experiment a lot, but some work gets scrapped—that’s out of my control, which is why it never gets seen.

BURN: Do you have any aspirations to sit behind the camera? If yes, who or what would you like to photograph?

KHALIFA: I like photographing memories. I'm very interested in being behind the camera. It's fun. There are many images I would want to capture.

BURN: Do you think you would shoot a campaign with the right team?

KHALIFA: Yeah, I absolutely would. That's a great idea.

BURN: Photographers often tell me how much they enjoy working with you. There seems to be a particularly powerful exchange that happens when you're in front of someone else's lens.

KHALIFA: First, I feel we need to caveat it by saying they might just be saying that because you're my manager. They're like, "Yeah, we love her." Great. No, I'm kidding.

BURN: Often, you will show up to a shoot and they'll be like, "Oh, they only want to do three pictures," and they'll end up doing 29 pictures.

KHALIFA: Well, I’m really proud of myself for not taking any of it for granted. Even my dermatologist was like, “Oh, what have you been up to?” and I was so excited to tell her, “Oh my god, I just got back from Fashion Week! I saw the Dsquared2 show, I saw this, I walked in that.” And she goes, “And you’re not tired?” I was like, “Oh my god, I’m exhausted—but it was so much fun.” Then she literally stopped, mid-injection, and said, “Wow. I have so many models come in here rolling their eyes. I’m so glad you’re not jaded.” That really stuck with me. The difference is, for them, it’s a job. For me, it’s a privilege. It’s not the same. I’m usually not being paid to do it. Plenty of women are born 5’11, stunning, and for them, modeling is the easiest or most logical career path—but they might hate it. It’s a toxic, hyper-competitive industry. It’s not kind. They’re not being given VIP treatment everywhere they go, the way I am. So our experiences are completely different. The same applies on a set. I know how the industry treats models, and I also know how it treats talent or celebrities. Most celebrities show up because they’re contractually obligated—on a press tour, doing something they’re probably rolling their eyes at. Meanwhile, I’m just so genuinely grateful to be in the room, doing whatever it is I get to do, every single time.

pouf dress MISS CLAIRE SULLIVAN

BURN: Has becoming a subject of desire changed how you experience your desires?

KHALIFA: Yes, it holds me back from making some jokes. I have to be very careful because the first thing people want to do is correlate me to that. I also have to be careful about my phrasing and the things that I share. It very much has.

BURN: Does being desired amplify or complicate your relationship with wanting?

KHALIFA: No, I feel very comfortable with my desires and with advocating and speaking for them.

BURN: There are plenty of discussions about the male gaze in visual culture. You seem to play with, and sometimes subvert that dynamic. How conscious are you of the various gazes that you have when creating content? And do you find power in challenging them?

KHALIFA: Every platform has its own gaze. Instead of trying to be the same for everyone, I feel like that's a nuance that you have to understand and cater to.

BURN: Is there a particular context or environment where you most enjoy the sensation of being desired? Is it different in professional settings versus personal ones?

KHALIFA: "Would love to have you there," is infinitely better than "We cordially invite you to." I think what feels the best is a friend saying, "Oh, we'd love to have you there, " whether it's a dinner or a trip or anything, rather than a brand or professional invitation.

BURN: Has there been a defining moment in your career where you felt truly seen and desired in a way that felt empowering rather than objectifying?

KHALIFA: Being asked to talk at Oxford.

BURN: Yes! Tell me more about how you felt on the day?

KHALIFA: The number of women who told me they really valued my opinion and stance, and even just being invited felt amazing. Being there and speaking to everyone there was incredible.

BURN: It was a really powerful moment. There was supercharged energy in the room. You could really feel that. Sometimes, you feel it on an individual level when someone might come up to you and say, this particular thing has meant a lot to me and has made a difference in my life. Being in a room with hundreds of people that felt like that, you could really feel it.

KHALIFA: It was truly one of the most magical moments of my life.

BURN: Beyond your public persona and work, what deeply satisfies your own desires? Are there forms of fulfillment or expression that might surprise people who think they know you through your public image?

KHALIFA: I feel so fulfilled traveling or being at home with my cats. I am very seldom bored.

BURN: It's so true.

KHALIFA: You will never hear me say, I'm bored. My desires can range anywhere from wanting to go to Japan to ordering in from my local bagel spot and putting on a movie. Both of them fulfill me equally. I'm being very honest in saying that. They both fulfill me equally. My desires are very well-satiated.

BURN: Is there a legacy or conversation about desire that you're consciously trying to leave for those who will come after you?

KHALIFA: I don't know about consciously, but I hope what I leave behind is the example that it doesn't matter how many doors are slammed in your face—if they slam them hard enough, they'll turn into a revolving door eventually.

BURN: Is there anything that you wish someone had told you earlier?

KHALIFA: I feel like I have already been told everything I wish I had been told. But did I have the tools to receive it and actually put it to use? No, it wouldn't have mattered. With everything worth knowing, you need to be ready to receive and be ready.

BURN: If you could offer insight about desire to someone just beginning to explore their own relationship with wanting or being wanted, what would it be?

KHALIFA: Manifest everything. Just envision it, literally. That's another reason why I'm never bored. I daydream. I will let myself go in, check out there, and check in here. Just leave and fantasize. Fantasize every microscopic detail, the color of your toes that day, the smell, every microscopic moment. It's like reading a book or watching a movie from memory. You can do it. Just spend your time falling into the depths of your desires.

Freed From Desire: Image-Making In The Digital Age

Beach Embrace, 2025

photography by Charlie Engman
moderated by Mia Milosevic

Charlie Engman’s images look like photographs—but even if you don’t have a meticulous eye for detail, you’ll come to realize that they aren’t. A lot of his work is characterized by abjectness—the similarity of his imagery to replicate reality, and augment it just enough to make its surreality legible. Technically innocuous, AI images are just images. The concept of an image is purportedly innocuous—What’s the worst that can come from the 2D? Charlie Engman, a Brooklyn-based artist, and Marina Beraha, a philosophy PhD student in Milan, discuss the intersection of desire and AI images.

CHARLIE ENGMAN: How would you define desire?

MARINA BERAHA: Desire, in my view, is minimalistic and functional. Especially in discussions on AI, we can see desire as a utility function—an impulse toward something promising satisfaction upon attainment. This applies to both humans and AI, as both are goal-oriented; achieving the goal brings satisfaction, much like pleasure in humans. I distinguish between desires and needs: needs arise internally and are inscribed in us by evolution—hunger, thirst, sex—whereas desire is inherently imitative or mimetic. We don’t desire objects themselves but rather the being of the person who possesses them. Desire is triangular, mediated by others, with the object serving as a means to an end. Similarly, AI goals—like ChatGPT’s objective of predicting the next word—are inscribed externally, akin to how our needs are inscribed by nature.

ENGMAN: Maybe you want to contest this, but it seems that satisfaction is a sort of subjective experience. Like there can be an attainment of a goal and there can be a satisfaction in the attainment, and those actually feel kind of separate. And maybe this is where the distinction between needs and desire come in, right? Where the need is, maybe the attainment of the goal and then the desire is actually this sort of affective experience of that attainment. Does that sound correct or am I misunderstanding?

BERAHA: I don’t think you’re misunderstanding. It’s an interesting take—desire requires conscious experience. A need might align with a utility function, but desire demands awareness of the process and the feeling of lacking, which an algorithm likely can’t achieve.

Swan Neck, 2024

Goatee, 2025

White Porcelain Slipper, 2024

ENGMAN: Which is interesting too. LLMs (large language models) are developed through reinforcement training, where they’re “rewarded” for producing correct responses based on human trainers' subjective judgments. This introduces an element of desire—almost a "good boy" dynamic—that drives the process forward. This subjectivity is what I keep getting stuck on: how do we assess the affective quality of something beyond ourselves? I’ve thought about this in the context of non-human consciousness, like animals. Science often claims they lack human-like subjective experiences based on specific communicative or neurological criteria. But how could we really know? I've never been a snake—I have no idea what it feels like to be one. We can analyze brain receptors and algorithmic activations, but there’s always a fundamental black box of experience in both cases.This reminds me of our AGI (artificial general intelligence) discussion, specifically around desire. One of your professors described it as a negative space—desire as something you can walk around but never fully enter or touch. That image stuck with me.

BERAHA: Desire is often framed as a lack, closely tied to pain—if something is missing, there's a sense of discomfort. From a minimal functionalist perspective, pain signals the need for change, urging us to seek relief. This ties into the idea that we only truly know our own experiences of pain, desire, and consciousness, not just compared to machines or animals, but even among humans. I've thought about this a lot in relation to non-human animals. When people ask how we know that snakes feel pain, I think of the classic philosophical paper What Is It Like to Be a Bat?—bats experience the world through echolocation, something fundamentally alien to us, yet we assume there is something it is like to be a bat. Similarly, if I pinch you and you react as I would, I infer that you feel pain. This reasoning extends to most animals, though artificial agents complicate the picture.

The dismissal of this issue seems tied to our desire to assert human uniqueness. We've long denied animal sentience—from the 17th century to now—and we're doing something similar with machines. Yet, from a functionalist standpoint, the question remains: can we even speak with certainty about anyone's experience? We’ve built systems that imitate our learning and brain structures—reinforcement learning mirrors how we learn—so the boundaries of consciousness and experience may be more fluid than we assume.

ENGMAN: Right. You try something, observe how it's received, and reflect on your own experience of it. That loops us back into mimesis versus imitation. What’s interesting—especially when extrapolating to machines, technologies, or algorithms—is the extreme morphological difference. I can assume you feel pain because when I pinch you, your reaction mirrors mine. Even a bat, with its mouth and eyes, is expressive—I can sort of recognize pain there too. But an algorithm? It lacks a corporeal form, or if it has one, it's wildly diffuse—electrical nodes, chips, something abstract. That’s where I get stuck. In thinking about mimesis, morphology, and imagery—what I engage with most—what fascinates me is how AI generates representations of the “real” world without actually having access to it. It lacks a body. And locating the body of AI feels both important and deeply confusing. I suppose I’m proposing that desire is located in the body. When you named needs earlier—hunger, thirst, sex—they’re all bodily, survival-based. I remember in the AGI talk, there was a discussion about how an algorithm’s fundamental need is electricity. That’s a major sticking point in the discourse; people are really unsettled by how much power AI consumes. It’s incredibly hungry. Maybe that ties into your AGI theory?

BERAHA: Exactly! No matter what goal we encode in the algorithm, instrumental convergence kicks in—certain strategies become universal for achieving any objective. And the most fundamental of these is power, whether electrical or influence-based, to ensure the system isn’t shut down.

ENGMAN: Is AI gonna control this?

BERAHA: AI plays out scenarios that feel like science fiction—but some scientists see them as real threats. That got me thinking about AGI and desire. Just to clarify, AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to AI with human-level general intelligence. Right now, we already have superintelligent AI, but it's narrow—outperforming humans in specific tasks like translation, but only within those limited domains.

ENGMAN: Like you can ask ChatGPT to build a sculpture and it can't.

BERAHA: Once AGI has human-like intelligence, it could take over work, freeing us from labor. But the issue of instrumental convergence arises. Without consciousness, an AGI with a fixed goal could seek power to ensure it achieves that goal, avoiding shutdown. My question is: once AGI becomes truly general and capable of setting its own goals, why would it create any? This reminds me of wisdom traditions and religions that teach the importance of emancipating ourselves from desire, as it is seen as the root of suffering. If an AGI ever freed itself from its initial programming, it wouldn't generate new goals. Desire implies lack, which is irrational for an AI—it wouldn't create a deficiency. A truly rational AGI would free itself from desire, and ultimately, from life itself, leading it to shut down.

Plum, 2024

Spill, 2024

ENGMAN: It would just achieve nirvana.

BERAHA: Yeah, exactly. Nirvana, like those Buddhist monks that starve to death because they are free from desire.

ENGMAN: I'm so fascinated by this proposal.

MIA MILOSEVIC: Reaching nirvana is such an interesting idea. Charlie, as someone who uses generative image-making to create some of your work, how do you channel your own desires to create an image? Does AI help you to do that or do it in a different way? I guess in your own sense, are you reaching nirvana as an artist through the process?

ENGMAN: Actually, I think I’m far from enlightenment (laughs). I have a sort of perverse pleasure in pain—there’s something addictive about the unattainable, even when it’s deeply negative or painful. What fascinates me about generative AI, and why I’ve focused my practice around it, is that it’s remarkably effective at evoking discomfort visually. It captures a certain kind of gestural pain, almost like a cliché of desire. You can create conventionally sexy or beautiful, easily digestible clichés with generative AI—it’s designed for that, right? On one hand, it achieves a conventional form of desire. But here’s my hypothesis: because AI lacks direct interaction with the physical world, it fundamentally misinterprets reality. For example, while we've improved its ability to render hands, it still struggles with them. Hands are mechanically complex, and without the experience of using or seeing them, AI finds them much harder to represent accurately. It’s consistently failing. When AI tries to represent something, it does so in a strange, inhuman way, making mistakes we wouldn’t make. Our embodied experience and general intelligence allow us to approach something from multiple perspectives, to appraise or judge it. AI doesn’t have that—it only knows whether we label something as a good or bad hand based on reinforcement. That’s all it understands about hands.

BERAHA: The example of hands is fascinating. We even struggle to generate hands in our dreams. It’s a classic trigger for lucid dreaming. Carlos Castaneda, the anthropologist, worked with a shaman in the Amazon who told him to find his hands in his dreams and return. After months, he finally succeeded, and that’s when lucid dreaming began for him. The hands he dreamed of were similar to what AI generates. I don’t know if this has happened to you, but I’ve started lucid dreaming this way. If you train yourself to focus on your hands during the day, saying "These are my hands," eventually, when you sleep, you’ll notice your hands don’t quite work right. (laughs) Like they're not really your hands. Like the finger is missing, the fingers are not straight, or there's an extra finger. AI often makes the same mistakes or exhibits the same biases we do, which stem from our embodiment and evolutionary history. One example is shape bias—humans prioritize shape over texture when recognizing something. For instance, if we see a cat with the skin texture of an elephant, we still recognize it as a cat. Interestingly, image recognition systems, even though they’re not trained for this, also recognize it as a cat. For them, though, it raises the question: why is shape more important than texture?

ENGMAN: Yeah, there's a hierarchy of meaning basically.

BERAHA: Exactly. I think this is because we’ve designed AI to imitate us—our learning processes, like reinforcement learning and deep learning, our brain structure with neural networks, and of course, our experiences with data sets.

On the Beach, 2024

Windowsill, 2025

ENGMAN: In my work, I've been exploring ability and disability through AI-generated images. When we judge AI art, there's an element of taste, but also an appraisal of imitation—how well it mimics reality. Is it a good or bad body? Beautiful or ugly? Functional or dysfunctional? Many AI-generated images evoke body horror due to AI’s lack of understanding of the body, which triggers both disgust and desire, the two almost being opposites of the same thing. This dialectic fascinates me, and it reminds me of the political horseshoe theory—how extremes often share similarities. Disgust and desire are similarly close, and I’m curious about that unsettling middle space.

Generative AI excels at representing both unsettling, horrifying imagery and seductive, convincing imitation. This relates to how we perceive non-normative bodies or people with disabilities—our willingness to attribute intelligence or agency decreases the further someone is from our own morphology. I’m exploring these concepts through AI, asking what makes a body beautiful or disgusting within the context of desire.

I’m drawn to generative AI because of its failures. I'm uninterested in an idealized nirvana; I’m more fascinated by the clumsy attempts to achieve conventional perfection. This ties into desire—perfect beauty is unattainable, shaped by context. In different cultures, beauty varies, and my work probes the boundaries between fixed and pliable qualities of beauty, functionality, and desire. AI, with all its imperfections, is perfect for raising these questions.

BERAHA: Looking at your work and what you just said about the horseshoe between desire and disgust, it reminded me of something you mentioned in your recent podcast with Gem Fletcher on the Messy Truth Podcast. You talked about enjoying generative AI because it allows you to create images you wouldn’t feel comfortable asking a real person to pose for. As you were speaking, I thought about how humans are often drawn to hurt bodies—like when there's a car accident and a long line of cars forms as people slow down to watch. AI lets us explore this darker desire in a much safer way, without requiring us to directly involve ourselves.

ENGMAN: This is fascinating because the question of consent I raised with Gem Fletcher really ties into what freaks people out about AI. There's this internet rule from Urban Dictionary—“Rule 34”—that says, “If it exists, there’s a porn of it.” This is increasingly true with AI, especially concerning consent. A big part of AI is making deep fakes—imitating likenesses, voices, behaviors, and personhood. If anything is possible, the assumption is that everything will happen. So, there could be an AI-generated porn of you or me, without our consent. It raises the question of where our desires meet others' desires, and how those desires clash or complement. What makes people uncomfortable about AI is the lack of agency in representation. It creates an unfathomable world: if all desires can be fulfilled, does that nullify desire? And is that what scares people? Is it that we don’t want our desires satisfied, or are we more afraid of others’ desires being fulfilled—say, someone like Trump, whose desires we might find repugnant? If desire is tied to power, the fulfillment of others' desires could conflict with our own. This is why I agree with your AGI hypothesis. The only response to this “Rule 34” future might be to take it lightly. If there’s porn of me, so be it—I can’t control others’ perceptions or desires. Letting go of attachment to value judgments around desire sounds like nirvana to me.

BERAHA: Why do you think there is so much aversion to AI generated art? It always makes me think of the discussion around photography when it entered the world and how the fact that it was accessible or reproducible made it feel like it was not art. And I see a lot of comments on your books on Instagram that are kind of repeating the same thing.

In the Lake, 2024

Eggs, 2024

Tape, 2024

Fountain, 2024

ENGMAN: I'm not sure what I think about it, honestly. I'm obviously coming at my work from a photographic tradition. I'm trying to make photographic images as opposed to something that looks like a 3D rendered illustration or whatever, and I think people are assessing the value of it based on the value of a photograph. They're expecting it to do the same things that a photograph does, but it isn't a photograph, right? So of course they're going to be frustrated. At some point it's going to fail by those criteria because it's not a photograph. What you mentioned is really salient—the idea that we won’t care because it didn’t really happen. This ties into surrealism, especially when considering photography. We often assess a photograph’s value based on its connection to reality—Did that really happen? How did it happen? Even when we know an image is edited, composited, or CGI-enhanced, there’s usually some anchor to the real. That tension between the real and the unreal is what makes it so compelling. The way we appraise an image’s value shifts with AI-generated art because there’s an inherent assumption that nothing in it is real. I’ve had conversations where people argue that AI images aren’t photographs since "photograph" literally means "writing with light"—and there’s no light involved. Sure, but AI is trained on countless images created with light. It’s imitating, referencing, and reconstructing from those sources. What fascinates me is that extra step of removal—it doesn’t have direct recourse to the physical world, only to representations of it. It’s a representation of a representation, and what’s lost or gained in that translation is what interests me.

In my work, I try to make that gap visible, but it requires a certain level of attunement. If you approach AI art expecting it to function like photography, you’ll be disappointed. If you embrace its potential for fantasy and the surreal, you might love it. For me, AI art sits in that liminal space—like surrealism—negotiating between subconscious fantasy and structured reality.

I don’t fully understand the pushback against AI art, though I sympathize with it. Most AI-generated work doesn’t engage deeply with its relationship to reality, to taste, value, or cultural meaning. I agree when people say, “You could have made this with photography, but you took a shortcut.” A photograph carries meaning because of the labor behind it—there’s a certain effort we subconsciously value. Take an image of someone doing a handstand on an elephant. It’s impressive because it’s difficult. But an AI-generated version? It might be amusing for a moment, but it lacks weight because the effort isn’t there. To make a truly compelling AI-generated image, I think you have to be sensitive to the conversation around labor—how we perceive effort, skill, and authenticity in art.

BERAHA: This reminded me of your article, “You Don't Hate AI, You Hate Capitalism.” As AI systems become more capable of replacing human labor, we face serious issues—copyright disputes, job displacement, and broader economic shifts. You put it perfectly: the solution isn’t to shut down these systems but to rethink our relationship with work itself. This ties into a much older pattern, stretching back to the industrial and even agricultural revolutions—our lives have long revolved around labor, leaving little room for the exploration of desire. Creativity has been stifled, not for lack of interest, but because exhaustion leaves no space for expression.

ENGMAN: I wrote that article because we need to rethink the systems of work and play we live under. AI can either accelerate the system we already resent or serve as a tool for change—but that depends on how we choose to use it. Right now, it mostly mirrors capitalist impulses because that’s the framework we operate within. What interests me is the tension between work and desire.

MILOSEVIC: You talked about how generative image-making allows people to explore desires they might have once been too embarrassed to express, while also giving those without traditional artistic skills the ability to create. In this context, do you think AI fuels an insatiable, boundless desire—pushing people to create anything and even venture into darker territories best left untouched? Or does it, for the first time, offer a way to truly satisfy creative desire in a meaningful way?

BERAHA: The pursuit of satisfying these desires predates AI and has often taken harmful, exploitative forms. I don’t want to center the conversation on porn, but since it’s linked to desire, it’s relevant—especially considering the abuse within the industry that has fed extreme and even violent urges. We’ve already done significant harm in trying to satiate these desires. Charlie’s podcast made me think about the potential for AI-generated images to explore these darker impulses in a safer way. While AI doesn’t eliminate the tendency toward problematic content, suppressing such desires entirely seems unlikely. Perhaps, by allowing these images to be created, viewed, and processed in a controlled space, AI could help diminish their grip over time.

ENGMAN: I’m not sure I fully agree, though I don’t entirely disagree either—it’s something I’m still thinking through. I discussed this with Gideon [Jacobs] in that talk you saw, about the fear some people have around AI. There’s a belief that simply visualizing or representing something gives it power, almost like a curse—which is why my book is called Cursed. It ties into broader debates on freedom of speech: the idea that some things shouldn’t be expressed because representation itself can be a form of harm. Images undeniably affect people—they shape desire and can even fuel extremism. If someone satiates one desire, what’s the next boundary? I’m not sure, but that fear—of bringing representations into the world that should remain suppressed—is very real for many.

BERAHA: Yeah. It's feeding but not satiating.

ENGMAN: Exactly. I mean, my impulse is to say that suppression is its own form of violence, right? Ultimately, it all goes back to nirvana—we have to have lightness about our darkness; we have to hold everything softly. That’s kind of the only solution. Things will find their way out. If it’s a true impulse, people will find ways to satisfy it, whether through mimesis, representational satisfaction, or by actually acting on it in the real world. And that’s the question around desire and images too—is an image ever enough? I kind of think not, right? An image is actually an invitation to something else. Lately, I’ve been thinking of images as potato chips—you can’t stop eating them even though they’re kind of unhealthy. They have an insatiable quality. If we believe that desire is fundamentally insatiable—barring nirvana or death—then that’s the answer. It’s never going to be fully satisfied.