We Come in Packs. The exhibition ‘Fandom’ by Anastasia Sosunova at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius

An unfortunate coincidence or a twist of fate? On the final evening of the calendar winter, when Anastasia Sosunova’s exhibition ‘Fandom’ opened its doors to visitors at the Contemporary Art Centre, the artist likely couldn’t fully immerse herself in the festive bustle of the opening or share the echoes of her creative journey with colleagues. Instead, reality came crashing down with all its brutality: the political drama unfolding in the White House reached a new level of grotesqueness. J.D. Vance’s mannered tone of disdain toward Zelensky, Trump’s trademark theatrical bravado, and rhetoric amplifying the effect of a distorted reality. This wasn’t just another routine political intrigue; the whole scene, the flickering of smart screens, the panic-stricken voices of political analysts in studios, and the collective focus on a single dramatic event, inadvertently became a real-life counterpart to the ideas explored in Sosunova’s exhibition ‘Fandom’.

The central video work of the exhibition, Xover, opens with speculative, fictional landscapes that the artist describes as interpretations of narrated images, an attempt to reconstruct places that never existed, yet live on as constructs of collective imagination. One unexpected crossover, worthy of both fan-made video montages and a post-Internet political tragi-comedy, occurred just days before the exhibition opening: the artist saw the president of the United States sharing an AI-generated video of ‘Gaza Rivera’ on the platform X. And suddenly, a surprising bridge emerged between the speculative, fictional landscapes at the beginning of Sosunova’s video and the hyperreal, fabricated geopolitical ‘reality’ presented by an algorithm as fact. In the context of contemporary art, this tension between fiction and supposed reality echoes Hito Steyerl’s piece How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, which illustrates how the images we consume can be both invisible and instrumental in shaping an omnipotent narrative, underscoring how today’s art not only documents but actively distorts and constructs our collective imagination.

Today’s political movements are often fuelled by the energy of populism, which structurally mirrors the phenomena of mass fan culture, the so-called fandom. Much like devoted fans who build their own mythologies around figures of popular culture, political supporters increasingly behave like radical fanatics, blindly following their ‘idol’, defending their narrative, and embodying their persona. Several moments in Sosunova’s exhibition can be read within this context, as a sensitive commentary on how the aesthetics, narratives and symbolic logic of mass culture seep into political reality, transforming it into a spectacle where emotion often triumphs over rational argument, and reality begins to function as a visual system. This invites reflection on the extent to which contemporary imagination, both political and cultural, relies not on facts but on symbolic narratives that operate through engagement, intuition and visual power, even when the stakes involve survival strategies or apocalyptic visions of the world’s end.

One of the more intriguing examples of how speculative thinking seeks to transcend the boundaries of time, language and culture is the so-called ‘ray cat’ concept, the idea of creating genetically modified animals that would change colour in response to radiation, becoming living warning signs for future generations in the event of civilisational collapse, when our familiar systems of signs might lose their meaning. This theory, operating between biology and mythology, proposes not a technical but a cultural solution, encoding danger not in an information plaque, but in a living, visually charged creature. Embedded within the ‘ray cats’ concept is a desire to abandon rational modes of signification that are comprehensible only to a specific epoch or culture. This notion resonates with the artist’s own inquiries: in her practice, the circulation of images, iconographic layering, and even the prophylactic remixing of fan-made visuals become methods not only of transmitting information but of generating intuitions, attitudes, and a kind of atmospheric knowledge. Yet a fundamental difference emerges at the level of function: the myth of the ‘ray cats’ is deliberately constructed as a tool to regulate future behaviour; whereas in the artist’s work, myth or narrative functions as an autonomous, wandering form, without a clear purpose, operating as friction, as time beside us, rather than as a warning.

The artist’s exploration of fandom, DIY culture, and their ties to collective storytelling highlights a compelling relationship between community-generated meaning and individual belief, even, one might say, a kind of quasi-religious symbolic excess born from collective emotional needs. I’m reminded of Jordan Peterson, the Canadian professor of clinical psychology and mouthpiece of the alt-right, bursting into tears during a livestream out of fear that collectivism leads straight to the Gulag, as if any form of communal spirit instantly triggers a totalitarian alarm. The irony here is unavoidable: Peterson, in all his rhetorical efforts to uphold the sanctity of individualism, becomes a meme akin to Kermit the Frog, a phenomenon of collective culture, endlessly circulated, transformed and reinterpreted through the lens of Internet folklore. In other words, whether he likes it or not, Peterson contributes to the very kind of collective imagination he so deeply fears.

Peterson seems to represent an epistemological purity of conservatism: order over chaos, logos over myth. But Sosunova’s practice, especially when she refers to the spiritual teachings of a home improvement store founder as a pseudo-religious doctrine that fuses nationalism, Christianity, liberal capitalism and a touch of theosophy wafting in from the Soviet mist, is a poetry of disorder, a dream of meanings, like images, always slipping away. Her approach is anti-Petersonian: narrative not as a hierarchical structure, but as a pile of dislodged security cameras thrown into a metal merchandise bin, fragments of collective memory that imperceptibly generate a new mythology and way of seeing. And what does the ‘ray cats’ theory suggest? That even when we think in ‘scientific’ terms, we still rely on myths, symbolic imagery, and instinctive collective imagination. We create radiation cats as a warning because the rational model is too weak to withstand the erosion of time. And what if the artist, working with the material of fandom, is essentially doing the same thing today? She reflects on a contemporary mythological thinking that no longer originates from the state or the Church, but from Reddit threads, YouTube comments, and fanfictions. The artist analyses that magic through visual means, through play, through gentle irony. She doesn’t propose an alternative doctrine, but reveals how such doctrines are born, not as acts of force, but as a synthesis of everyday objects, fragments and beliefs.

In the thermal camera footage used by Anastasia Sosunova, individual features are seemingly erased, bodies become patches of heat moving through darkness. The artist reflects on a kind of ‘Martian energy’, the need for aggression, release and transgression, which continues to find symbolic expression even within civilised society. Even where fireworks are officially banned, their allure persists. This becomes especially ambiguous in the context of the war in Ukraine, when rockets are exploding in real life, settlements are being destroyed, and people are dying; a festive explosion, taking place thousands of kilometres away, suddenly feels naive. Within this tension between celebratory euphoria and global tragedy, the thermal imagery captured by Sosunova becomes almost an anthropological study: she does not observe individuals but collective action, a ritual need to release, to celebrate through fire and explosion. It’s a compelling yet uncomfortably familiar landscape, where civility collides with archaic instinct. A completely different poetics of the thermal camera can be found in the work of the British artist Caroline Broadhead. While Sosunova uses the technology to explore aggressive impulses, collective behaviour, or psychogeographic terrains, Broadhead turns thermal imaging into a tool of intimacy, a means of capturing traces of warmth, points of touch, the body’s fragility in time. Her gaze is quiet, almost meditative, focused on the personal moment of being rather than on social spectacle. Thus, the same technology reveals two opposing states of human experience, external chaos and inner warmth.

One of the most subtle and striking layers of the exhibition lies in the resonance between its display architecture and the concept of so-called rage rooms: spaces where everyday objects become legally sanctioned outlets for aggression. In Sosunova’s installation, old printers, screens and surveillance cameras are lined up as if carefully selected not only for their aesthetic qualities but also according to the logic of impact, objects that seem to invite being smashed. This relationship with objects, somewhere between cultural artefact and sacrificial offering, reveals a contemporary need to release energy in a way that is both civilised and instinctual. If fireworks in the video works function as ritualised discharge, here it’s technological remnants, long past their usefulness, that become a kind of ‘digital era bone relics’. We cannot destroy what we still consider valuable, so we destroy what has fallen outside the bounds of progress. There is less nihilism in this destruction than there is a gesture: of release, of losing control, of restoring power. And here, unexpectedly, the opening scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind: the ape discovering the bone as a tool. Only this time, the bone is a Wi-Fi router, a scanner or a discarded monitor. Evolution here is not a forward movement, but a cyclical return to the beginning, this time with a post-industrial landscape in the background. Smashing the object becomes not an act of destruction, but a meaningful gesture, a way to feel, to express oneself, to exist. And perhaps this, among all the explosions and artefacts, is one of the few sincere acts we still allow ourselves.

As Virgil wrote, ‘My mind is intent on singing of shapes changed into new bodies.’ Such a spiritual impulse, a desire to sing and convey what has taken on a new form, feels fitting when attempting to grasp Anastasia Sosunova’s exhibition. It is a multifaceted, multilayered narrative in which speculative landscapes, folkloric webs of intuition, technological artefacts and collective emotions interweave into a disordered, yet remarkably vibrant tapestry. A short review can barely define it, at best it may only brush against it, trace the contours of something that is constantly shifting, vibrating, slipping away. In this exhibition, fandom acquires an existential depth. Not as a superficial fascination, but as a form of contemporary mythology that functions like ancient epics: gathering, shaping identity, allowing meaning to emerge from what is inevitable, chaotic or painfully close. Perhaps this is the exhibition’s true essence, not to offer a finished narrative, but to respond to the inner impulse to sing of shapes changed into new bodies, and to show that even the most fragmented forms of collective imagination can become a temporary, yet meaningful, refuge for significance.