Mayday mayday mayday

Anna Afonina’s works are always somehow connected with the theme of memory and time and its perception. Often she translates personal memories in it and, at the same time, archetypal images taken from the collective unconscious. The artist likes to mix and collide the personal and the mass. In her practice, she turns to children’s mythology, early memories and associations on this topic. Two years ago, Anna graduated from the Repin Academy, and now it’s strongly influenced by the aesthetics of necrorealism. She’s also fascinated by the aesthetics of “digital errors”, the effects of repetition, obsession, that’s what her artistic method is made of.

Anna Afonina, an artist:

…What I’m doing now is this kind of reflection from watching old films and I think it turns out at the same time about the phenomenon of time and about the feeling of time. About how we treat memories like in a dream, when, for example, you think you’re sleeping all night, but it’s been only a couple of minutes. If you look at the old films for a long time, there is a feeling of “Sleep paralysis” but not in a bad sense, namely the psychological moment that the image begins to be perceived as some kind of message that you are looking at yourself from the film and trying to say something. And then I immediately have an association with codes and signals for help. For example, the word “Mayday” is a day in May, but if it’s repeated three times over the radio, it means the signal “Help me”.