Agency of Singular Investigations

Anna Titova and Stanislav Shuripa founded Agency of Singular Investigations (ASI) in 2014 to take a stand on the dramatic changes in Russia's political reality and cultural atmosphere and to respond to the advent of the postfactual age by thinking about alternative ways of harnessing images and means of communication for the construction of identities and worldviews. The publication's core is an extensive conversation between the artists and the curator Maria Lind about the political situation, the power and function of language, artistic strategies, and their exhibition On New Thinking and Other Forgotten Dreams at the Secession. The dustcover is an intervention by the artists and refers to two works in the exhibition. The handmade cutout shows a young woman who appears to be dancing; in reality, she was brutally arrested by police at an antiwar protest in Moscow in 2022. In the diagram Lavender Mist of History (2023), the artists sketch a web of events that illustrates the history of decline and sclerosis in Russia over the past several decades.