Anna Titova's collage series "Multiplicity Redefines the City" is a reflection on the connections between different forms of time — historical, everyday, and utopian. The collage technique precisely fits the task the artist sets for herself: to convey the sensation of a historical moment in which the intrusion of the future into the present asserts itself through unexpected rhymes and connections between things, quantum entanglements of identities, situations, and spaces. The present is filled with traces and fragments of the future and the past, layers and collisions of fragments of histories, versions, narratives, rhythms and patterns, traditions, and algorithms. It is in this shimmering presence of other times — in formats of the possible or virtual, of expectations or experiences — that the collage nature of digital (hyper)modernity reveals itself.
Every moment in history is fraught with unpredictability; every situation holds exits into the unprecedented. What if today we are on the brink of new "roaring twenties"? What if, after overcoming the pandemic, people become tired of avoiding one another and start gathering together to enjoy life, communicate, and create new forms of communities? If public spaces, emptied during the era of isolation and digital control, once again become meeting places, arenas for openness to new forms of what the Situationists called "experimental behavior"? In this possible future present, fragments of our today will remain, but in different roles and plans, like old buildings among new developments, where unknown hopes and expectations, memories and concerns will reside.
One of the forces linking moments of the present to history is the desire for another world, a utopian impulse that typically reveals itself unexpectedly, hiding in the folds of the everyday, only to suddenly flare up at the break of historical time before dissipating into the endless game of reflections and simulations. The presence of this desire, inevitable and not fitting into a cohesive image, becomes what stitches together with invisible threads the fragments both of the pictorial plane of the collage and the thousands of surfaces of everyday experience in the world of networked communication. The very collage-like nature of this force, shimmering through the differences of the real, imagined, and conditional, is likely what allows it to become a source of post-individualistic cloud-networked identities and forms of self-understanding.
Text: Stanislav Shuripa
Every moment in history is fraught with unpredictability; every situation holds exits into the unprecedented. What if today we are on the brink of new "roaring twenties"? What if, after overcoming the pandemic, people become tired of avoiding one another and start gathering together to enjoy life, communicate, and create new forms of communities? If public spaces, emptied during the era of isolation and digital control, once again become meeting places, arenas for openness to new forms of what the Situationists called "experimental behavior"? In this possible future present, fragments of our today will remain, but in different roles and plans, like old buildings among new developments, where unknown hopes and expectations, memories and concerns will reside.
One of the forces linking moments of the present to history is the desire for another world, a utopian impulse that typically reveals itself unexpectedly, hiding in the folds of the everyday, only to suddenly flare up at the break of historical time before dissipating into the endless game of reflections and simulations. The presence of this desire, inevitable and not fitting into a cohesive image, becomes what stitches together with invisible threads the fragments both of the pictorial plane of the collage and the thousands of surfaces of everyday experience in the world of networked communication. The very collage-like nature of this force, shimmering through the differences of the real, imagined, and conditional, is likely what allows it to become a source of post-individualistic cloud-networked identities and forms of self-understanding.
Text: Stanislav Shuripa
