Anastasia Sosunova. Ghost ship

From 16 February to 28 April 2024, Galeria Arsenal in Bialystok will present an exhibition by Anastasia Sosunova, the Vilnius-based artist’s first solo presentation in Poland.

The exhibition explores the endurance of magical thinking in our contemporary world and examines the power that signs and systems of control, tradition, and belief have in shaping individual and collective behaviours today. It will provide a thorough survey of Sosunova’s multidisciplinary practice, which combines video, installation, sculpture, and graphics to chart alternative forms of contemporary folklore and world-building. Proceeding with an autoethnographic approach, her work grows from personal histories—in particular the developments experienced in “post-Soviet” Lithuania and Central and Eastern Europe—and examines their entanglements within broader cultural, economic, and spiritual structures. Her practice focuses on the bonds around which communities are forged, from local vernacular art to housing developments to self-help practices to religious organisations to nationalist groups to corporate structures to queer subcultures. She observes how these closed groups are developed, often in reaction to other values or conditions, and how they subsist through shared sentiments and the development of rituals, traditions, beliefs, codes of conduct, and collective agreements. At once critical and empathetic, Sosunova uncovers such practices that offer participants a sense of meaning and empowerment in an increasingly confusing world, where new identities and relations are formed by creating myths on top of other myths.

Sosunova’s hybrid objects and video narratives are populated with migrating, syncretic, deformed, partial, and mutated iconographies where the sacred and mundane are intertwined, disparate elements are interwoven, and common cultural practices, codes, and artefacts come to take on esoteric, and often contradictory, meanings. Her work exploits the logic of the icon as a symbol that can be inflected with divine powers and tell stories, a functional technology for maintaining social and spiritual bonds. By layering and disfiguring charged images and objects, the artist calls attention to the ways notions of tradition and an imagined past are regularly distorted to support authority and recovers, reclaims, and reinvents these signs to imagine new collective formations. Sosunova’s exhibition will highlight a wide range of emergent folklores within our seemingly disenchanted and melancholic world, probing these narratives to explore the role personal and collective fictions play in our social relations.

Anastasia Sosunova (Ignalina, Lithuania, 1993) is a visual artist based in Vilnius. She graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts with BA in Graphic Arts and MA in Sculpture. Her recent solo and duo presentations include Editorial, Vilnius; Eastcontemporary gallery, Milan; Cell Project Space, London; SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen; Britta Rettberg, Munich; and the Screens Series programme, New Museum, New York. Her work has been shown in group presentations at such venues as the BFI Film festival Experimenta programme at ICA, London; 14^th Kaunas Biennial; Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art 2 and Contemporary Art Festival Survival Kit 14, Riga; MACRO Museum, Rome; Malmö Konstmuseum; Contemporary Art Center and the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; d’Art Contemporain, Genève; Palais de Tokyo and Centre Pompidou, Paris; FUTURA Contemporary Art Centre, Prague; Baltic Triennial 14, Vilnius and elsewhere. Sosunova won the JCDecaux Emerging Artist Award in 2018.

Accompanying events

16.02.2024 (Friday), at 18:00
Opening
In the program: banquet prepared by Dominika Święcicka, Querelle performance and karaoke <3

18.02.2024 (Sunday), 12:00 pm
Guided tour with artist and curator

9.03.2024 (Saturday), 12:00 pm
Guided tour in Belarusian

10.03.2024 (Sunday), 12:00 pm
About the works of Anastasia Sosunova
Screening and guided tour by Post Brothers

16.03.2024 (Saturday), 12:00 pm
Guided tour in Ukrainian 

27.04.2024 (Saturday), 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
A day with curators available in the exhibition space