What Was and Never Will Be. The Art of Anastasiia Sonina

Exhibition View: Horizons That Never Were by Anastasiia Sonina at The Small Gallery

Anastasiia Sonina’s work interrogates the fragility and instability of memory and perception, moving beyond conventional artistic boundaries by integrating analogue photography, reflective aluminium surfaces, and acrylic interventions. Her recent exhibitions—Light Holds No Memory at Atticus Gallery (9 August – 13 September 2022) and Horizons That Never Were at The Small Gallery (GHAT) within Aberdeen Royal Infirmary (15 November – 25 December 2022)—mark significant milestones in the evolution of her practice. These exhibitions demonstrate how Sonina’s works unfold across multiple registers, creating liminal spaces where personal memory, collective history, and identity remain in flux—fragmented and incomplete.

Sonina’s hybrid technique exemplifies Rosalind Krauss’s post-medium condition, where the dissolution of medium-specific boundaries allows contemporary artists to operate beyond the constraints of traditional categories (Krauss, 1999). By layering acrylic paint over analogue photographs printed on aluminium, she transforms what would typically be fixed images into ambiguous visual events. This approach offers a meditation on the fluidity of memory, challenging the assumption that photography provides objective documentation of reality. Instead, the photographic image becomes an expressive medium shaped by the instability of memory and perception. Aluminium, as a reflective surface, stands as a metaphor for permanence and industrialisation, contrasting with the ephemeral nature of the photograph, which Barthes (1981) identifies as always pointing to a “that-has-been,” the trace of a moment now irrevocably distant.

At the core of Sonina’s work is the phenomenology of perception, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that perception is not passive observation but an active, embodied engagement with the world. Merleau-Ponty (1962) argues that perception arises from “the background from which all acts stand out, and which is presupposed by them” (p. 10), highlighting the relational nature of experience. In Light Holds No Memory, the reflective aluminium surfacesactively incorporate the viewer’s presence, reinforcing the idea that meaning and perception emerge through dynamic interaction. As the viewer shifts their position within the gallery, new layers of colour, texture, and reflection unfold, revealing the fluidity of both experience and memory.

Sonina’s intervention with paint further complicates the photographic image, reflecting Roland Barthes’s notion of the photograph as a “that-has-been”. However, by introducing painterly erasure and transformation, she disrupts the indexicality of the photograph, suggesting that memory is not a stable repository of the past but a palimpsest of personal and cultural layers. Barthes (1981) notes that photography’s essence lies in its power to testify to what has existed, but Sonina’s practice challenges this fixity, exploring how memories are continually rewritten through acts of recollection and forgetting.

In both exhibitions, fragmented horizons and abstract landscapes evoke liminal spaces—those transitional zones that defy easy categorisation. These horizons dissolve into atmospheric gradients, representing the shifting psychological and cultural states associated with migration and displacement. Lyotard’s (1994) conception of the sublime helps elucidate these spaces: they provoke a sense of awe and disquiet, as they confront viewers with the ungraspable, much like the ambiguous horizons in Sonina’s work. The presence of geometric forms—rectangles, bars, and squares—intersecting these gradients serves as a metaphor for attempts to impose structure on experiences that resist definition. These shapes remain incomplete, mirroring Derrida’s idea of deconstruction, where meaning is never fully stable or fixed. As Derrida (1976) famously puts it, “there is no outside-text” (p. 158), underscoring that representation is always partial and shaped by absence as much as presence.

The installation at The Small Gallery (GHAT) further emphasised these themes by situating the artworks within the context of a hospital—an environment inherently tied to recovery, change, and transition. In this non-traditional gallery space, Sonina’s works invited patients and staff alike to engage with the fluidity of meaning and experience during moments of introspection and pause. The collaboration between GHAT and Exposed Arts Projects, led by Jo Hastie and Sasha Burkhanova-Khabadze, demonstrates the potential of contemporary art to foster emotional connections in everyday environments, reinforcing the idea that art can integrate meaningfully into the rhythms of life.

In both exhibitions, the tension between permanence and impermanence is heightened by the juxtaposition of the reflective, industrial durability of aluminium and the ephemeral layers of acrylic paint. This tension reflects Sonina’s personal experience of navigating post-Soviet identity, where the weight of historical narratives coexists with the need to construct new meanings. Her muted palette of blues, greens, and browns evokes nostalgia, yet it remains complicated by abstraction, suggesting that both memory and identity are fragmented, fluid, and unresolved.

Sonina’s engagement with the sublime—as theorised by Burke and Lyotard—creates a sense of confrontation with the unrepresentable, an encounter that lies at the heart of her dreamlike landscapes. These works offer affective spaces, where viewers are invited to reflect on the fragility of the natural world and the complex interplay between the organic and the artificial in the Anthropocene. Through subtle interactions of light, shadow, and reflection, Sonina’s art draws attention to the uncertainties and ambiguities that shape both personal and collective experience.

The immersive installation at Atticus Gallery further enhanced these themes, with works arranged in a circular black-walled space. Vertical steel sculptures echoed the lines and forms within the paintings, establishing a dialogue between two- and three-dimensional elements. The reflective surfaces of the aluminium subtly incorporated the viewer’s presence, reinforcing the central themes of perception, memory, and ambiguity. In contrast, the hospital setting at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary offered a more intimate interaction with the works, embedding art into the rhythms of recovery and healing, demonstrating how art can create moments of reflection and connection in unexpected contexts.

Through these two exhibitions, Anastasiia Sonina has affirmed her position as an artist deeply committed to exploring the complexities of memory, identity, and perception. Her works challenge viewers to engage with the fluidity of meaning, embracing the instability that lies at the heart of both personal and cultural experience. In her practice, memory is not fixed but an evolving narrative—layered, fragmented, and in flux. Both Light Holds No Memory and Horizons That Never Were showcase Sonina’s ability to create affective landscapes—spaces where viewers are invited to reflect on the uncertainties and ambiguities that shape the human experience. Her art does not offer answers but instead invites us to embrace the beauty of incompleteness, ambiguity, and transformation.

References:

• Barthes, R. (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Hill and Wang.

• Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology. Johns Hopkins University Press.

• Krauss, R. (1999). A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. Thames & Hudson.

• Lyotard, J.-F. (1994). Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Stanford University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge.

About the Artist

Anastasiia Sonina was born in 2000 in Samara, Russia, and is currently based in the United Kingdom. Her artistic practice emerges from a deep engagement with the tensions between personal memory, collective history, and the fluidity of perception. Working at the intersection of photography, painting, and material exploration, Sonina prints analogue photographic images on aluminium, enhancing and transforming them with acrylics. This hybrid process allows her to explore how memory, experience, and space are constantly shifting, interpreted through subjective layers.

Her works engage with themes of nostalgia, post-Soviet identity, and the interplay between presence and absence, informed by both philosophical inquiry and personal reflection. Through her immersive installations, Sonina creates affective landscapes, where colour, texture, and geometric forms reflect the complexities of memory and identity. Her art invites viewers to engage with uncertainty, transformation, and the beauty of incompleteness, underscoring that what was, never truly will be again.