In 'Input Error' (2026), two horses emerge from the horizon, their hooves encased in thick fur and the wind streaming through their hair. They emerge from forsaken online archives and race across a sunset shoreline. Their movement is unstable and ecstatic, caught between collapse and fantasy, embodying a desire to outrun imposed categories of what makes a horse or a human, or a human – an animal, and what makes a reality, conjuring alternative forms of being.

Masha Barks (b. Moscow) is a London-based multidisciplinary artist pursuing her MFA at the Slade. She explores human–animal relationships by switching the roles of her subjects, both literally and conceptually, drawing from queer and furry communities’ radical reimagining of identity, gender and animality. Online archives and furry databases are central to her practice, where she collects, recontextualises and translates found imagery through traditional artistic media. Her work stands with the marginal, displaced and extinct, finding kinship in shared Otherness and the persistent desire to belong within a landscape in flux. Her work has appeared in Frieze Magazine, and she has completed the Turps Banana Residency (2024) and Colart Residency (2026), as well as collaborations with Slade, the Grant Museum of Zoology, ZSL, and Liquitex.