Artist in Residence in Stockholm, 15 November 2024–25 February 2025

Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina (born Kolomna, USSR) is an artist and media theorist living and working in the UK. She works with film, digital media, embroidery and lecture-performances, often transposing analogue and digital techniques. Drawing on her experience growing up with post-Soviet and early Internet cultures, her work investigates haunted aspects of digital colonialism in contemporary algorithmic culture, AI and infrastructures, challenging the heritage of Western modernity in the current technological conditions of knowledge production, governance, labour and affect.

Photo: Aava Anttinen

Alexandra Anikina

During her IASPIS residency she will focus on two projects. The first is Net-Works: a series of banners and tapestries that mix bead weaving and embroidery techniques with pixel art. Both protective charms and ritual objects, Net-Works treat the slow labour of weaving as an ongoing commentary on war, memory, witnessing and post-socialist necropolitics. The second project is a new film that explores the “cybergothic” as an overwhelming condition of the politics of platforms in the current political climate. Drawing on the Thai tradition of cinema projections as offerings to the spirits, it interrogates the practices of belief and escapism on social media platforms, surveying the encroachment of attention economy onto the potential for solidarity and belief in times of world-wide deepening political crisis.

Sasha holds a practice-based PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, and she is currently a Senior Lecturer at the department of Art and Media Technology in Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK. She was co-curator of media art festival IMPAKT 2018 ‘Algorithmic Superstructures’ and Digital Earth fellow in 2020-2021. Her work has been shown internationally, including V Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2015); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Gaîté Lyrique, Paris; Anthology Film Archives, New York; NCCA Moscow; Korean Film Archive and Art Sonje Museum, Seoul; Sanatorium gallery, Istanbul; Pi Artworks, London; Krasnoyarsk Museum Biennale; Schusev State Museum of Architecture, Moscow; ar/ge kunst, Bolzano.