COSMOSCOW ARTFAIR 2024

In today's world, where meme culture, internet content and post-truth dominate, the ability to shape and convey narratives is becoming a key aspect for both artists and viewers. The study of images of contemporary reality through the prism of internet culture and social media phenomena, AI algorithms, and the interaction of various subcultures, which lead to the formation of new, sometimes unexpected narratives, reveals the conceptual basis of the works of artists Elena Popova and Anna Titova, presented at the ARTWIN GALLERY stand. 

The influence of surrealist Marcel Duchamp on contemporary art, with his characteristic irony and reinterpretation of everyday objects, is echoed in Anna Titova's installation ‘The Multitude Redefines the City’ (2024). The ghosts of art from the past, the layers and collisions of objects from the fashion industry with fragments of underground culture, together create a sense of quantum entanglement and, at the same time, reveal the collage-like nature of digital (hyper)modernity. 

Anna Titova's installation is a cyberpunk landscape that offers its own alternative system of visual codes, shifting our ‘familiar’ perception of the contexts that surround us. In this ‘redefinited city,’ temporal patterns undergo changes, and new forms of communities emerge, striving toward a common goal: the creation of an alternative world.

Elena Popova's monochrome canvases continue to explore the dark side of progress: reduced to a kind of figurative-symbolic system or emblematicity, these abstract, laconic canvases, woven from black and white threads, resemble either mystical symbols or post-apocalyptic banners. 

The symbolic image of Ouroboros, a serpent guarding the ‘treasures’ of the technogenic world, in Popova's worldview, focuses attention on the problems of humanity's relationship with manual labour and high technology, as well as on the perception of the world as an aesthetic construct dependent on such things as underground oil and gas pipelines.  A monochrome graphic tapestry entitled ‘I Feel Your Footsteps on My Skin’ (2024), where Ouroboros wraps around the Tree of Life, surrounded by a heavenly multitude of birds and stars, reminds us that every moment, every instant, every event contains the past, present and future. Every moment conceals eternity. Every departure is also a return, every farewell is a meeting, every return is a parting. Everything is both the beginning and the end. 

Double archaeology, as a tool for constructing narratives within the works of Anna Titova and Elena Popova, also becomes the principle of representation of the created objects in the space of the gallery stand. Despite the different aesthetic principles and issues that the artists work with, their interests intersect, intertwining in a common reflection on the current state of the world.