Artist Elena Anosova will speak about the role of her study of maps, sailing directions, and contemporary geodata in her art practice, drawing on the example of her research project Atlas of the First Snow.
Atlas of the First Snow grew out of a photographic series exploring the polyethnic community of hunters and fishers who live in the basin of the Nizhnyaya Tunguska in the Far North of Russia (Atlas of the First Snow series, 2015–2021). As Anosova worked on the project, it developed into an artistic exploration of the local landscape, a study of traditional and technological means of mapping and describing the land, its waterways, and its resources. In 2025, the project was supported by Garage Field Research.
Today, the everyday life of the local population—descendants of the Evenki, Tungus, and Hamniga people, as well as Russian colonisers and Soviet geologists who arrived later—still revolves around the Nizhnyaya Tunguska river with its many tributaries. In the Soviet era, printed road maps were produced exclusively for official use, which limited their circulation. However, people made copies for everyday use on tracing paper. This practice remained common until the 2010s, when contemporary electronic interfaces became available.
Elena Anosova, who grew up in this region, discovered handmade copies of road maps in her family archive. Her study of these maps alongside DIY digital maps, Soviet sailing directions, and contemporary high-accuracy spatial data focused on the way visual representation of data reflects different worldviews and technologies.
One of the outcomes of her art research project was the series of screenprints (a new format for her) Basin and Blanket, whose compositions are based on contemporary geodata on river patterns with integrated hachures—a mode of representing relief on maps invented in the eighteenth century. These works reflect Anosova’s ambition to transfer documentary imagery into abstraction.
Elena Anosova (b. 1983, Irkutsk) is an artist, researcher, curator, and teacher, head of the Project Thinking studio at Rodchenko Art School in Moscow (since 2021), and co-founder of the Baikal art residency Delo o klubnike. Solo exhibitions include: Section (photo-eye Gallery, Santa Fe, 2016) and Atlas of the First Snow (Planta1, Madrid, 2022). She is a recipient of artist grants from Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow, 2018), Aaron Siskind Foundation (USA, 2019), and GES-2 House of Culture (Moscow, 2022). She has won awards from Center Project (2016), World Press Photo (2017), and others.
