Tainstvo
2018
Video installation, 18’15”
Anastasia Sosunova (1993) works with sculpture, video, and images to reflect on notions of the ‘alien’ that occupy space in our everyday lives. Personal narratives and collected evidence showcase language as a symbol of identity as well as of miscommunication. Sosunova’s own experience of growing up in a Russian family in Ignalina, on the periphery of Lithuania, speaks to the multiplicity of identities in the Baltic region and to the possibility of growing up as a foreigner in your own home country. Images similarly warp and define locations, becoming wormholes in alien contexts. Using words, images, objects and symbols, Sosunova reflects on the ‘Outlander’ that lives amongst us and the underlying rifts that still define our era.
Tainstvo is the Latin transliteration of the word ‘sacrament’ in Russian and is simultaneously a lay term and an institutional one. On one hand, it can be used to define everything related to the field of spirituality, while on the other it denotes specific Christian rituals—different sacraments. The film is based on Sosunova’s research on the Lithuanian Orthodox Church and the way it situates itself amongst different languages, borders and political systems. Edited conversations with believers and church officials show how the closed community is tied together through the processes of the liturgy. The images bring symbols of the church into the sphere of gaming and Pokemon Go, illustrating the muddled position of the contemporary church.
anastasiasosunova.com