Anastasia Mityukova

project iceworm
ongoing

Project Iceworm is one of the artist’s first series on Greenland. It tells the story of the American military presence during the Cold War, and its consequences on the local populations of the Thule region, in the very north of the island. In 1941, the United States built a secret military base there, and in 1953 its expansion led to the forced evacuation of the Inughuit, a traditional Inuit community. In the context of the Cold War, the United States launched the construction of a secret underground base in 1957, Project Iceworm ...

Have You Ever Seen an Iceberg in the Rain?
2022-2023

Have You Ever Seen an Iceberg in the Rain? is a series produced by the artist during her residency in Greenland. Mityukova’s work deals with photographic ambiguity, that is, the fact that on the one hand we automatically treat photography as evidence, while on the other we regard it with great suspicion. Exploiting this tension, she presents photographs made as visual-notes during her residency, where she photographed the details of her environment. The words associated with the images comment, criticize and poeticize her environments, opening new perspectives of interpretation to her own view of the Arctic landscape. They also confront an imagination nourished by countless popular cultural productions with a reality on the ground that she likes to describe as «photographic disappointement».

Visual notes
2023

part of the photographic corpus produced by the artist in Greenland. She considers them more as an accumulation of visual notes that can be mobilised for her projects, or as an index confronting the reality of the field with media stereotypes, than as an independent work.

Wunderbaum, «Arctic Ice»
04–23–24

Similar to the blue tones of the «Arctic» paintings, the olfactory objects using the same term are supposed to evoke the fresh air and purity of ice landscapes. Again, far from the reality of the terrain – villages whose main economic activity is hunting and fishing are accompanied by the distinct scent of decay – the artist satirically mobilises the use of the word «Arctic» to describe a minty freshness, in an olfactory installation based o the famous air freshener.

A Poem That Is Not One
07–15–24

A Poem That Is Not One arises from the confrontation between the artist’s experience on the ground in Qaanaaq and the images she associates with this Arctic geography. After returning from her research trip, Mityukova tried to understand how our conception o this region is formed by browsing through magazines, books or articles, whose content had shaped her imagination since childhood. From this retrospective and introspective journey, she retained fragments of texts describing these regions of the Far North, where recurring motifs and expressions are mixed: «fjords», «phosphorescent night», «gusts of wind» or «ice crystals» tell of virgin landscapes, exploration or the unchanged life of the Inuit populations, without taking into account the many current geographical, social or geopolitica issues. Through a random editing process that evoke Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Billio Poems, Mityukova generates poems that, through the repetition of these romantic motifs, reveal the omnipresence of an imaginary world that contributes to the construction of a romanticized and simplified vision of the Arctic, even today.