ASSEMBLAGE (2019–2022)

Photography, installation, video (9:40)

Sound: Alexey Vokhmyakov (music), Evgeny Kormiltsev (mix)

Exploring industrial, restored and natural forests but always trying to remain on the transient boundary between the forest and the disturbed human landscape, in this project Anastasia Bogomolova acts as an agent of displacement. Proceeding from the logic of artificial flora migrations, she uses her own body converting it to a kind of a platform that transports and connects non-human travellers within one — corporeal — ecosystem.

In her photographic performances, created in the sterile conditions of the artist studio, Bogomolova utilizes natural materials collected in various ecological niches. The plants and lichens overcome distances separating them and form both habitual unions and impossible assemblages on the human body. Illuminated brightly and colourfully, the hybrids appear as jewellery pieces, a system of signs, or, finally, futuristic modifications striving to move beyond the dichotomy of nature and culture.

In the video part of the work this practice of studying the migration of species is reversed and scaled. The human body finds itself in a disturbed landscape — in the industrial forest, year after year turning into a wetland — and obeys the landscape logic of the bush.Visually, the project is divided into two parts. In the first, the artist explores forest landscapes next to well-trodden paths, which look wildly in the images. In photographic performances there the human body is subordinated to the forms of bushes.

The gender-neutral body in the Assemblage serves not as a statement of binarity, but as a neurotic breakthrough into the times beyond gender and, as a result, beyond exploitation.