Anna Guseva: The Black Night Calls My Name

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This week on LENSCRATCH visitor editor Yana Nosenko brings collectively the work of 4 photographers tracing the post-Soviet situation.
We are happy to current a number of initiatives and conversations with Anna Guseva, Margo Ovcharenko, Anastasia Tsayder, and Yulia Spiridonova.

Post Co-op

This exhibition brings collectively 4 photographic practices that hint the post-Soviet situation as a lived actuality formed by house, worry, self-discipline, displacement, and the physique. Across panorama, portraiture, and long-term documentary work, these artists look at what stays after methods collapse or harden, when “home” turns into unstable and visibility is negotiated reasonably than assured.

Soviet microdistricts re-emerge as overgrown Arcadias, the place vegetation quietly reclaims utopian structure and transforms management into unpredictability. The psychological aftermath of the Nineteen Nineties seems as an inherited internal local weather, the place violence and instability depart lasting marks on identification. In the closed world of girls’s soccer, queer youth discover solidarity and refuge inside strict boundaries, whereas the encompassing surroundings stays hostile. In exile, immigrant communities kind fragile “spaces of appearance,” providing non permanent belonging whereas intensifying the strain between survival and assimilation.

Together, these works converse to endurance beneath unstable circumstances: how folks adapt, cover, re-root, and proceed. Here, “home” is neither assured nor singular. It is overtaken by crops, haunted by reminiscence, protected by guidelines, looked for in diaspora, and frequently reconstructed, one picture at a time.

Portrait of Anna Guseva, Courtesy the artist.

Anna Guseva (b. 1994) is a visible artist born in Russia and based mostly in France since 2018. Her observe engages with the politics of reminiscence, specializing in collective trauma and the load of adverse historic legacies. Working with performative methods, she examines how the delicate human physique absorbs and displays structural violence and the invisible pressures of cultural and political environments.

Anna was shortlisted for the Gomma Grant 2024 (introduced in early 2025). In 2024, she was additionally a finalist for the PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant, the Singapore International Photography Festival, the Prix Révélation at Festival OFF Les Rencontres d’Arles, GUP Fresh Eyes, and the Belfast Photo Festival. Her work has been offered in group exhibitions on the National Library of Singapore and the Kommunale Galerie, Berlin, and in portfolio screenings on the PhotoVogue Festival in Milan and Festival OFF Arles. Her collection have been printed in Fisheye Magazine, Der Greif, Yogurt Magazine, and FK Magazine, amongst others. In 2024, she gave an artist discuss on the photobook competition Nizina.

Follow Anna Guseva on Instagram: @annagsv

The Black Night Calls My Name

I used to be born in Russia in 1994. It was a turbulent interval after the collapse of the USSR, generally known as the “wild nineties.” Though I used to be a baby, the chaos of that decade left a deep imprint on me.

I bear in mind stepping over the our bodies of drug addicts sprawled within the stairwell. Syringes crunched underfoot throughout walks close to my home. My grandmother scared me with tales about rapists. On New Year’s Eve, males walked round with damaged noses, spitting blood. I bear in mind the unease of watching vehicles pushed by drunks swerve unpredictably. Demonic symbols have been painted on the home windows of a sectarian condominium. I hid within the nook when the doorbell rang—as a result of that’s how homicide and theft scenes started in TV collection. Crime reveals ran nonstop. For some, they fueled worry; for others, aggression.

The pessimism, nervousness, and suspicion shaped in the course of the Nineteen Nineties turned a part of my identification and nonetheless manifest in me. But what if, in obsessively fearing aggressors, I unwittingly absorbed their traits? As I research my very own blind spots, I worry discovering a monster nurtured within the nineties. The best risk just isn’t revisiting horrifying recollections, however confronting a predator inside myself.

As I attempt to determine areas of uncertainty inside me, I encounter a common mechanism of unpredictability: the exterior surroundings shapes us in methods which might be inconceivable to foresee.

Yana Nosenko: How did you start engaged on The black evening calls my title?

Anna Guseva: The venture emerged from my try to know the preconditions that made Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine attainable. There are, after all, quite a few trajectories for such reflection from analyzing present occasions to inspecting earlier chapters of Russian historical past. However, it was essential for me to concentrate on an period that’s embedded in my very own lived expertise and whose penalties I can hint inside my very own biography. That is why I turned to the Nineteen Nineties.

Furthermore, what is going on at the moment bears a terrifying resemblance to that decade: the normalization of brute pressure, the dominance of aggression, and the logic of racketeering over legislation, rights, and respect for the person and human life. By participating with this era, I’m not working with the previous as a closed historic chapter, however with the continuing influence of a social surroundings that continues to form methods of pondering and responding within the current.

YN: The work is deeply grounded in post-Soviet Russia, but it touches on fears that really feel common. How do you think about viewers who didn’t expertise the ‘wild nineties’ getting into the venture?

AG: My goal just isn’t solely to doc the particular historic expertise of the Nineteen Nineties, however to present a extra common mechanism by way of which environments affect the person. Anyone can discover themselves in a state of affairs the place historic occasions or the present political actuality of their very own nation start to form their pondering, all whereas remaining solely partially acutely aware.

In a world with a steady and shared data area, this affect is not confined by nationwide borders. We could be affected by the violence, aggression, and instability occurring in different, geographically distant contexts, with out instantly understanding the way it imprints itself upon us. I think about {that a} viewer who didn’t expertise the “wild nineties” doesn’t entry the venture by way of the popularity of particular particulars. Rather, they enter it by way of an encounter with a way of uncertainty and nervousness born from the lack to acknowledge and management the influences of the exterior world.

YN: Do you see this venture as an act of confrontation, therapeutic, or preservation, or one thing unresolved?

AG: In Russian tradition, the Nineteen Nineties have lengthy been romanticized. Gangsters in movies and TV collection have been usually portrayed nearly as knights – bearers of a specific code of honor, devotion to their moms, and loyalty to their gang. The music of that period was ceaselessly reused as a type of cultural exoticism, carrying a intentionally reckless or “wild” aura. Over time, I turned more and more uncomfortable with the belief that I personally had participated in reproducing these narratives – usually routinely, with out analyzing what they really carried inside them. For me, this venture is an try to look actually at the imprint that period has left on me, with out romantic and nostalgic filters, even when it results in uncomfortable discoveries about myself.

YN: Many of the recollections you describe are fragmentary and sensory. How do you translate these inside sensations into photographic kind?

AG: The venture took on a performative kind and options quite a few self-portraits that seize my bodily actions. However, I don’t consciously search a particular corporeal language to precise these pictures; it emerges by itself, rising from inside. Most conditions linked to that point don’t set off sequential recollections in me, however reasonably bodily flashes.

The pictures of the Nineteen Nineties are rooted not a lot within the acutely aware thoughts as within the physique. I imagine it is because I lived by way of that period at an age once I couldn’t but rationally comprehend what was taking place, but I perceived it acutely on a bodily stage. These experiences turned encoded as bodily impulses. Some of those bodily “situations” or “urges” are even tough for me to translate into phrases – I can really feel and recreate them, however I can not title them.

YN: When working with imagery tied to worry, violence, or trauma, how do you distinguish between documenting worry and reproducing it, and the way, if in any respect, does the current political local weather in Russia affect these choices?

AG: Since 2022, I’ve not returned to Russia, and all the venture has been shot in Europe – in France and Germany. Initially, I looked for places which may visually echo the surroundings of the Russian Nineteen Nineties. However, I quickly realized that for me, it was not about particular locations as such, however about specific configurations of house that activate that acquainted, childhood sense of anticipated risk within the physique. Working this manner allowed me not merely to breed or replicate one thing exterior, however to bodily enter and expertise states of tension, foreboding, unpredictability, and lack of management in the course of the act of photographing itself.

YN: How did the choice to make this venture emerge, and do you think about the viewer as your self, a technology formed by the 90s, or somebody with out that lived expertise?

AG: It is necessary for me to share this venture with completely different audiences. Certainly, with those that lived by way of the Nineteen Nineties and, over time, got here to understand that interval by way of the lens of romanticization and nostalgia. But additionally with viewers from different nations, for whom this historic context is unfamiliar, but whose lives could have been formed by different social or political traumas that imperceptibly deformed their internal panorama. The venture doesn’t assume a shared expertise. Instead, it gives an area for recognizing the mechanisms by way of which collective historical past penetrates non-public life and continues to function even when the unique trauma seems to belong to the previous.

YN: Has engaged on this venture modified the way you relate to your recollections of the 90s, or how current these experiences really feel in your life now?

AG: Completing the venture didn’t result in reconciliation with these recollections, nor did it diminish their presence in my life – however I by no means approached this work as remedy. I proceed to look at how that period retains unfolding inside me, in social processes, and in politics. The depth of my reactions to sure signs of that point has not subsided.

Recently, I got here throughout tv promoting from 1994 – commercials selling Cypriot offshore schemes and cruises from Genoa to Tenerife. I used to be struck, and couldn’t simply let go of the sense of indignation provoked by the dimensions of social inequality. While 1000’s of individuals – professionals with greater schooling, very like my mother and father – couldn’t discover respectable work and shared a single sausage for dinner, the screens cheerfully broadcast alternatives that have been light-years away from the truth of most viewers. I don’t imagine a definitive endpoint is feasible right here. Rather, that is an ongoing strategy of commentary and recognition.

Yana Nosenko is a multidisciplinary artist and curator initially from Moscow, Russia. Her work explores themes of immigration, displacement, nomadism, and familial separation — drawing from her personal experiences and expressed primarily by way of lens-based media.

She has exhibited on the International Center of Photography Museum, Gala Art Center, MassArt x SoWa, and Abigail Ogilvy Gallery. In 2023, she was awarded a residency at The Studios at MASS MoCA. That identical 12 months, she joined the Griffin Museum of Photography as a Curatorial Associate and Exhibition Designer, the place she helped co-curate and set up exhibitions, oversaw day by day operations, facilitated artist talks and panels, designed advertising and marketing supplies, and labored carefully with guests and artists. In 2025, Yana was appointed Director of Education and Programming on the Griffin Museum, the place she continues to foster inventive dialogue and studying by way of exhibitions, public packages, and neighborhood engagement.

Before specializing in images, Yana studied graphic design on the Stroganov Moscow Academy of Design and Applied Arts and labored as a graphic designer at Strelka KB, an city planning agency in Moscow. In 2017, she accomplished a significant unbiased venture: the design of Mayak, a typeface impressed by Soviet Constructivist fonts of the Twenties–30s, later launched by ParaType.

She holds an MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a certificates from the International Center of Photography.

Posts on Lenscratch is probably not reproduced with out the permission of the Lenscratch employees and the photographer.

This web page was created programmatically, to learn the article in its authentic location you possibly can go to the hyperlink bellow:
http://lenscratch.com/2026/01/anna-guseva/
and if you wish to take away this text from our web site please contact us