Anastasia Sosunova (born 1993) is a visual artist based in Vilnius. Her multidisciplinary work combines video, installation, sculpture, graphics, and text with broader cultural, economic, and spiritual structures.
Sosunova’s work explores the connections around which communities are built – from local folk art and neighbourhood co-existence to religious organizations. She is interested in the formation and functioning of these closed groups, which often act as a response to different values or ways of being; she looks at how these groups survive thanks to shared sentiments, rituals, traditions, and collective agreement. Interweaving and distorting the elements of public surveillance, hybrid creatures, and ancient mythologies, Sosunova creates alternative forms of ‘contemporary folklore’. From lifestyle to foundations of faith, these new folklores are simultaneously a play with notions of home and belonging to a community, an attempt to question forms of existence and coexistence, and a critical approach to power structures and collective psychology. Her works are like proposals for novel ways of coexisting, new relationships based on rules, codes, ethics, and mutual agreement between beings.