eastcontemporary, Milan
Aleksandra Sidor, Anastasia Sosunova
The gallery’s exhibition proposal for Art-o-rama 2023 features a new body of work by Aleksandra Sidor (b. 1991, Poland) and Anastasia Sosunova (b. in 1993 Lithuania).
Through a series of installations, sculptures, paintings and videos, both artists enhance the point of encounter between optimistic faith in advanced technology and the collective subconscious, also expressed through the cyborg body functioning as a site of control, condensation and displacement.
Anastasia Sosunova presents a video, sculptures and etchings on metal. The artworks expand upon some of the thematics she explores within her practice – the origins of collective belief in authority, the magic of ideologies and secular faith – and, in particular, the aura surrounding today’s technological development; themes which first emerged in the publication of her first book, Express Method (2021). The works are part of her recent research focusing on “coding” (kodavimas in Lithuanian), a placebo-based addiction therapy created in the 80s through cybernetic studies applied to the mind, coded and subconsciously stimulated to reject wrong actions. Other than contextualising the success of coding’s “secret society” within Lithuania’s esoteric resurgence before the collapse of the USSR – a litmus test of the demand for rituals and other healing methods in a secular society, as well as trust and curiosity about new automated technologies that surfaced at the time – Sosunova’s works articulate critical considerations around current technological advancement run by supremacist ideals.
Aleksandra Sidor presents a new series of eerie and surreal paintings inspired by the writings of Bogna Konior, among others. Interested in the body as a boundary concept, Sidor has been recently interested in visual explorations of the human and the machine. “Our bodies today are spread over a number of apps, each limb tended to by another wireless device, a piece of a body on the phone, a recording of a body on a website. […] The body needs to be pieced together like a puzzle across all of our appliances. Stimulation comes from everywhere, each street brimming with erotic possibilities if seen through an app that scans the metropolis for willing partners, human or machine. […] Machines spread our phantom bodies over the globe, opening it up to titillation, annihilation, desubjectification, livestreaming us.” (from Determination from the outside: stigmata, teledildonics and remote cybersex by Bogna Konior).
https://www.east-contemporary.org
