Knowitall

Through the process of distortion and the interweaving of elements from ancient mythologies, the history of print, and late-capitalist society, Sosunova creates alternative forms of “contemporary folklore.” Ranging from lifestyle concepts to foundational beliefs, these new folklores play with ideas of home and belonging, question existence and coexistence, and offer a critical perspective on power structures and the psychology of collectivity. Her work becomes a proposition for new ways of living – guided by rules, ethics, codes, and agreements between beings.

With her newest works II, p. 11 and Knowitall – originally created for her solo exhibition Fandom at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius this year – Sosunova engages with the tradition of printmaking and subtly comments on the inherent responsibility that print carries in a given era. By resisting the act of making actual prints and instead exhibiting only their bases – copper and zinc plates – she draws attention to the spiralling effects that printing, and by extension publishing, have had as means of communication.

In Sosunova’s installative work, the title Dance As You Wrestle is borrowed from The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (2018) by Polish-British writer Joanna Zylinska. Within the exhibition, dancing while wrestling serves as a fluid counterweight to the “apocalypses” of the present. From manga to the Orthodox Church and Lithuanian reality TV, the apocalypse permeates pop culture, theory, and social attitudes – emerging in a dual form: both as fact and as mood, a state of mind.