PENNLAB Gallery presents Elena Anosova's solo exhibition "Inside Soft Gold", the final chapter of the ten-year Atlas of the First Snow project, dedicated to the history of the artist's family and the life of a multiethnic community of hunters and fishermen in the Nizhny Tunguska basin. 

The project combines photographs, silkscreens, objects, still lifes and archival materials. Among the key works is a series of silkscreens. The works were created based on drawings of natural riverbeds in the region. In an area where rivers have always served as roads and navigation systems, streamlines turn into a mental memory map.

The name of the exhibition refers to sable fur, the "soft gold" of Siberia, an invaluable resource that locals have been exchanging for goods from the outside world for centuries. The exhibition features original objects. These are replicas of sable skulls left over from the fishing of the Russian-Evenki hunting community, of which the artist's family is a part. They are made of modern materials and painted in shades of gold. 

The exhibition also features a series of still lifes "Grapes, cedar and lingonberries". The work is devoted to traditional northern recipes, the ingredients for which have become a difficult resource to extract in recent years. The forest fires of 2018-2019 destroyed the harvests of berries, mushrooms and pine nuts: the cedar will begin to bear fruit in its sixtieth year of life, and the mycelium and shrubs will take decades to recover. The lack of the usual food of the locals turns these still lifes into a metaphor for lost practices, recipes, ways of life and ways of survival.

An important part of the exhibition was the artist's archive, collected since 2015: family and local photographs of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods are presented together with modern photography, a copy of the Soviet lot's page and a handwritten map of ancestral hunting grounds. Working with spatial data occupies a special place in the project: in an isolated region, illegal copies of official maps have been redrawn manually on tracing paper for decades, supplemented with notes and edits. These homemade maps are not only a navigation tool, but also a trace of history in which knowledge is passed on within the family and community.

"There is always hope that a way will be found, that there will be food, that everyone will return home, that the family will be together, that winter will finally end, and the monsters will be defeated. We build our own stories and choose our own hope," says the artist.

Elena Anosova (born 1983, Irkutsk) is an artist and researcher. In his projects, he addresses the topic of boundaries and the nature of relationships in isolated landscapes and gated communities. Elena combines documentary, conceptual and installation practices, working with photography, sculpture, video, graphics, archival images and books.
The artist has been a recipient of grant programs for authors and researchers, including the GES-2 House of Culture, the Aaron Siskind Foundation, and the Garage Museum of Modern Art. She has also participated in Russian and foreign art residencies - Zarya (Russia), KulturKontakt (Austria), Docking Station (the Netherlands), etc. Her projects have received international awards, including World Press Photo, Center Project, LensCulture Exposure Awards and others.

Detailed information about the gallery:

PENNLAB Gallery is a gallery that works with current Russian photography in the context of contemporary art. Since 2024, he has been a member of the Association of Galleries (AHA) and is a member of the organization's expert group on print art. The PENNLAB gallery space was opened on February 24, 2021 by Nikolai Dmitriev and Mikhail Krasnov.      
The gallery cooperates with both young artists and famous Russian masters of Russian photography of the twentieth century. He organizes exhibitions on an ongoing basis, as well as educational events for the general public and professionals, participates in auctions and fairs.