Landscape

2015 – 2016

In 2014, my husband and I moved into a house divided into two living quarters, one for us, the other for my mother-in-law. Previously, we lived in rental apartments, often furnished and equipped. The new house compelled us to hastily acquire new belongings. About this time, my mother-in-law also moved in her lifetime’s worth of personal items. Everything ended up in the room that I had mentally reserved to serve as my artist studio. There were sports cups, samovars, books, taxidermied crocodiles, plaster statuary, garden sculpture, samurai swords, and heaps of clothes and shoes.

The archive attacked me as it spread around the house, in the corners, on the windowsill, in a closet and stairs. I resisted. I hid it. I secretly threw it out. I moved things from place to place. Eventually, I cleared out a small space for my studio, but it was only when I began accepting these things, becoming a part of them, that I understood what things are, what they can be. They become the process that merges families, drawing the story of two families into one, turning individual archives into a collective landscape.

Anastasia Bogomolova works across photography, installation, and performance. She deals primarily with the binaries of memory and oblivion; document and possibility; and identity and mythology. A graduate of FotoDepartament.Institute, St. Petersburg, Anastasia’s work has featured at Savignano Immagini Festival and Bitume Photofest (Italy), Pingyao International Photography Festival (China), Obscura Festival (Malaysia), Photobiennale and Fashion and Style in Photography (Russia), Month of Photography in Minsk (Belarus), and exhibited in group projects in Phoenix, Cologne, Chicago, St Petersburg, Moscow, Kaliningrad, Perm, and Yekaterinburg. Her solo shows in Russia have been exhibited in Moscow, Ekaterinburg, Nizhniy Tagil, and Chelyabinsk (Russia). Anastasia is the winner of the 2016 Credit Suisse Cosmoscow Prize for Young Artists. She lives and works in Chelyabinsk.