GOSSIP WORKSHOP 17th Lyon Biennale, Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne

2024

Curators: Isabelle Bertolotti, Nathalie Ergino, Marilou Laneuville

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Gossip Workshop is an installation commissioned for the 17th Lyon Biennale by the Institut d’Art Contemporain. The artwork continues a line of Sosunova’s work on the proliferation of print culture under the pressures of capitalism and censorship. Seven printing plates replicate 7 windows of Rotas, a printing house of the independent Lithuania that published the first country’s gay magazine Naglis between 1994 and 1997. By word of mouth, Rotas was known as a tacit place of employment for the Vilnius queer community. Erotic photography content inside the pages of Naglis was creatively appropriated from Western gay magazines (mirrored, redrawn, collaged, cropped), while graphic illustrations were created by the authors who preferred to stay anonymous. Now abandoned, the building’s windows have become a graffiti board for lovers who write their initials on dirty glass. In Gossip Workshop, photos of vitrines are turned into offset plates, becoming matrices in their own right: covered with engraved and etched images depicting the stories of anonymous printers. Their history is usually written on dust, but now it is set in metal. 

Photos: Jair Lanes