Migration is a traumatic experience. I last visited my homeland some 15 years ago. I walked around our old house, which had already been bought by new owners. My grandmother’s roses and the apple trees — things that had once been mine to enjoy were now behind a fence and no longer accessible. For me, it was unfinished business, which only art could help me leave behind. These explorations of mine come from within, from essential personal needs. When I study archives, migration, home, and memory, I look for the visual tools that help best express my ideas.

During the pandemic, I lived at a summer house and looked for ways to capture the beauty of nature, of plants that would soon wither; I wanted to somehow stop the fleeting moment. Photography didn’t appeal to me, nor did making a herbarium, and that’s when I discovered cyanotype. I started with flowers before moving on to archival photos and X-rays. I love how simple this technique is.

Blue has a vast spectrum of shades. I see color symbolically; blue represents infinity, the sky, water, and metaphysical phenomena.

Anastasia was born in Kazakhstan’s Semipalatinsk Region in 1987. Her family moved to Russia’s Krasnoyarsk Krai when she was still a child.
In 2010, she graduated from the School of Architecture and Design at Siberian Federal University with a degree in Art Education. In 2019, she studied at the School for Curatorial Studies at the Zarya Center for Contemporary Art (Vladivostok) and the 4th DAKK Siberian Young Art Lab (Krasnoyarsk).

Anastasia doubles up as an artist and a curator at the Ploshchad Mira Museum Center in Krasnoyarsk. Her medium of choice is cyanotype, a technique she mastered during the pandemic. She also works with ceramics, textiles, and other materials.

Her work explores the fragility of human existence — both the physical vulnerability of the human body and the inevitability of life’s circumstances. Hence, her interest in memory practices, recollections, and archives. Printing on fabric using cyanotype helps Anastasia feel the fluidity of time, which can be slowed down and examined up close.

Anastasia also explores her own experience of migration, from the sunlit landscapes of Kazakhstan to the harsh climate of Siberia.

In 2023, she was nominated for the Sergey Kuryokhin Award in the Best Curatorial Project category for the exhibition Wow, It’s Andrey! hosted by the Ploshchad Mira Museum Center in Krasnoyarsk.
Her works are held in the collection of the Ploshchad Mira Museum Center and private collections.

Ophelia Syndrome. Industry Space, Krasnoyarsk

Floodplain Meadows. An installation at the 15th Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale

Co-curated Civilization River, Krasnoyarsk Krai’s pavilion at Tavrida Art Young Art Festival, Crimea

Melancholy. Ploshchad Mira Museum Center, Krasnoyarsk

2022

Street Vision Festival of Contemporary Art, Music and New Urban Culture, Tomsk

Body in Certain Circumstances. 3rd Apartment Biennale, Tomsk

Taigart. Ploshchad Mira Museum Center, Krasnoyarsk

To Wait For. Chetverg Foundation for Cultural Projects, Moscow

2023

Architecture of Life. Museum of Wooden Architecture, Tomsk

An Impossible Discotheque. Catherine Assembly, Saint Petersburg

All Flowers. Sevkabel Port, Saint Petersburg

Flicker. Art&Brut Gallery, Moscow

2024