Refigured Survival Kit 14 Long-distance friendships, Old Market building, Riga

2023

Curators: Inga Lace and Alicia Knock

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A series of collages Refigured combine offset lithography, intaglio, digital prints and found materials. The artworks apply and reinvent 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 stories about the printing press at the secret underground printing house “ab” in Kaunas that functioned throughout 1980-1990, become a starting point in constructing the metal canvas of Refigured. The press which printed mostly patriotic and religious literature, was ironically named Hell’s Machine (Pragaro Mašina in Lithuanian) by the founder of “ab” Vytautas Andziulis who constructed the press out of the discarded and destroyed printmaking machine parts found at the scrap metal. In line with the printmaking tradition of destroying a matrix after completing an edition, and a totalitarian tradition of wrecking a printing press after it’s been discarded, Anastasia Sosunova showcases collaged plaques and prints at the Survival Kit exhibition in the Old Market building partly using matrices from “ab” and images from other magazines that have been published despite of great political pressure.

The primary narrator in this context is the history of 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 collaging images of queer friendships.