Works from the series "Refigured" (2023)
Mixed media prints and engravings
Combining offset lithography, intaglio, and woodcut techniques with digital prints and found materials, a series of collages attempt to search for new imageries of international friendships and struggles by using and reinventing iconographies from a wide array of sources – zincography plaques from “ab” underground printing house, Soviet internationalist propaganda poster references, Lithuanian gay magazine Naglis from the 90s, pixelated fragments from the Ugandan queer magazine Bombastic, and imageries from personal archives and social media.
The work at Survival Kit 14 as well as Kaunas Biennial was inspired by the printing press at the secret underground printing house “ab” in Kaunas that functioned throughout 1980-1990. The press which printed mostly patriotic and religious literature, was ironically named “Hell’s Machine” by the founder of “ab” Vytautas Andziulis who constructed the press out of the discarded and destroyed Soviet printmaking machine parts found at the scrap metal. In line with the printmaking tradition of destroying a matrix after completing an edition, and a Soviet custom of wrecking a printing press after it has been discarded, Anastasia Sosunova showcases collaged plaques and prints at the Survival Kit 14 festival in the Old Market building partly printed at “ab”, while also composing a new, reconfigured, and stitched body of work at the Kaunas Biennial using these fragmented plaques, employing a strategy that she calls “an expanded montage”.
The primary narrator in this context is the history of the real and imaginary history of underground printing and image dissemination, encompassing a multifaceted narrative of knowledge and violence, imagination and propaganda, empowerment and the construction of identity. In the process of “refiguring”, in which material forms and iconographies are reclaimed in order to re-create and reinvent them, the artist imagines alternative futures by reproducing the poetics of decolonial queer friendships. This time, “post-Soviet” and anti-colonial, transcending space and time on our own terms.
Anastasia Sosunova's work can also be seen in the sister-exhibition Long-distance Friendships at the 14th Kaunas Biennial.
/ Photo credit: Kristīne Madjare / Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art