Crossover, the exhibition concerning the research of the Lithuanian artist Anastasia Sosunova and curated by Chiara Nuzzi at ICA Milano, functions as a laboratory for decoding layered and complex visual systems. Broad themes such as religion, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, and the rise of the bourgeois-capitalist myth interact with micro-elements of historical storytelling, including autobiographical traces and local folklore. According to image theory, ethnology and anthropology, Sosunova constructs a research where tradition interacts with market economy, folklore with production, cultural value with monetary value, all pervaded by “love, fanaticism, hope, and melancholy”^[1].

Anastasia Sosunova, “A sock”, 2025, “Xover”, 2025, installation view, “Anastasia Sosunova. Crossover”, curated by Chiara Nuzzi. Courtesy Fondazione ICA Milano and the artist. Ph. credits: Andrea Rossetti Archive

According to Sosunova, crossover means the fusion of two universes within a single image and the representation of a shift between semantic states – such as the secular crossing into the sacred. In the AB Prints  series (2023), photographs of everyday and devotional objects reveal how images’ meaning migrate from one state to another. When Lithuania emerged from Soviet rule and entered the market economy, pictures once produced by a dissident print shop were absorbed into an auction catalogue. This provoked the erasure of their worth for a financial valuation. With this series, Sosunova neutralizes political and economic connotations, stripping the prints back to their primary semantic state. In doing this, she demystifies the image, restoring it to a language-object^[2], endowed with transitive value^[3] and revolutionary charge. What is clarified is the rhetoric^[4] embedded in the political, economic and cultural structures which shape both a place and its inhabitants.

Anastasia Sosunova “AB Prints”, 2023, installation view, “Anastasia Sosunova. Crossover”, curated by Chiara Nuzzi. Courtesy Fondazione ICA Milano and the artist. Ph. credits: Andrea Rossetti Archive

In semiological terms, Sosunova dismantles an entire linguistic system – myth – through processes of de-mythologization and re-mythologization^[5]. The images in AB Prints are handled as archival fragments: objects uprooted from their original context, reproduced like objets re-trouvés, and sent into a new drift of meaning. In A light bulb and a chestnut (2025) and A sock (2025), Sosunova reflects on the idea of the relic. A sock, a barricade fragment, a chestnut collected during a protest, a burnt-out lightbulb become vessels signifying the transition between contrasting systems of value. Relics and reliquaries evoke the codification processes behind sacred images: parts of a saint’s body, objects touched by the saint, and, through increasing layers of mediation, the souvenir. By activating this shared religious imaginary, Sosunova elevates contemporary themes, translating the formation of surrounding myths into visual form. Residual autobiographical objects thus become witnesses to events that define history.

Anastasia Sosunova, “A light bulb and a chestnut”, 2025, “Express Method”, 2022-2025, installation view, “Anastasia Sosunova. Crossover”, curated by Chiara Nuzzi. Courtesy Fondazione ICA Milano and the artist. Ph. credits: Andrea Rossetti Archive

Her work performs a critical intervention on elements already saturated with symbolism, already mythic, already image. At the center of the project room, the video installation Xover (2025) adopts the narrative structure of fanfiction. Through dreamlike digital renderings, the film reconstructs Harmory Park SPA, a resort built by the Lithuanian entrepreneur behind the “Senukai” DIY retail chain. The notion of DIY recurs in Sosunova’s research, which examines the tension between pre-capitalist, vernacular craft production and mass industrial production as an engine for the restoration of the national identity at the end of the twentieth century. The film highlights not only the founder’s influence on local pop culture – fluctuating between admiration, fanaticism, and melancholy – but also the entanglement of production and individualism. In his case, entrepreneurial identity shifts into a personal religion, whose iconography and ethics permeate the companies and architectural spaces linked to his figure.

Anastasia Sosunova, “Xover”, 2025, video still, courtesy Fondazione ICA Milano and the artist

In Express Method (2022–2025), Sosunova references the Orthodox Epiphany and the collective rituals surrounding this celebration. Traditionally, on the night of January 18, all water on Earth acquires purifying power, prompting people to plunge into frozen rivers and lakes and to preserve portions of the water in containers of various kinds. This practice generates a form of “DIY sanctity” independent from Church mediation or institutional authority. Here, tradition intersects with autobiography through the Sprite bottles used by the artist’s family as holy-water vessels. The coupling of sacred ritual and the Sprite brand broadens the discourse: a mass-market commodity, which works as an emblem of consumerist mythology, grafts itself onto popular culture, reshaping its contours.

Anastasia Sosunova, “Xover”, 2025, video still , courtesy Fondazione ICA Milano and the artist

The exhibition as a whole is densely layered. Tradition, contemporary iconographic construction and the crisis of codified political and cultural systems converge to produce a deep linguistic and media crossover. The gold of reliquaries gives way to the burnt smell and soft plastic of A sock. The Senukai system generates both the euphoria of a liberal bourgeois myth, and the frustration of an imaginary that morphs into dream, a dream that narrows the boundaries of identity and individual freedom.

^[1] Chiara Nuzzi, Anastasia Sosunova, p.3.
^[2] Object-language means the opposite of metalanguage, that corresponds to the discourse about something. “Object language” responds to an operative, active consciousness. R. Barthes, Il mito, oggi, in R. Barthes Miti d’oggi, Einaudi, Torino, 2016, p.204.
^[3] Transitive value means the capacity of an object or an image to speak the world and to define an action. Myth, understood as a metalanguage, has the function of speaking about the world, generating a clarity that takes on the features of nature. R. Barthes, Il mito, oggi, in R. Barthes Miti d’oggi, Einaudi, Torino, 2016, p.226.
^[4] Rethoric is a plain of recurring elements in which grows the shape of the mith. R. Barthes, Il mito, oggi, in R. Barthes Miti d’oggi, Einaudi, Torino, 2016, p.230.
^[5] According to Roland Barthes, re-mythification is a tool for overturning the mythical discourse. From a semiological point of view, this process is carried out through the construction of a third chain of signification that uses the rhetoric of myth as a signifying element, which means the first term in the equation signifier–meaning–sign. The result is the representation of myth as naivety being observed. In the case of Sosunova’s critical action, the result is the unveiling of the agglomerations and shifts of meaning produced by a given cultural datum upon the objects it engulfs. R. Barthes, Il mito, oggi, in R. Barthes Miti d’oggi, Einaudi, Torino, 2016, p.216

Info:

Anastasia Sosunova. Crossover
curated by Chiara Nuzzi
20/11/2025 – 7/03/2025
ICA Milano
Via Orobia 26, 20139 Milano
www.icamilano.it

Lorenzo Rebosio

After graduating in Economics and Management of Cultural Heritage, he earned a master’s degree in Art History. Writing is a way to engage directly with artists’ research, gaining in-depth knowledge of them, and bringing out the layers of their language. The work of art responds to an intimate, shared and complex code that requires constant exploration and dialogue.