Russian artistic duo Anna Titova and Stanislav Shuripa aka ‘The Agency of Singular Investigations’ reconsiders the role of utopias in its latest project 'Another Life of Grete S' at Iragui gallery in Paris.

The Agency of Singular Investigations is a collective founded in 2014 by artists and educators Anna Titova (b. 1984) and Stanislav Shuripa (b. 1971). A new exhibition is currently on show at the Iragui Gallery in Paris where both artists are members of the Agency of the Artists in exile in the French capital.

Over the course of its eleven year existence, the Agency has developed a sophisticated and meticulous approach to observing "the evolution and expansion of the human mind " using a variety of different media. Their numerous "found" archives and personal museums may appear as an elaborate artistic mystification. However, the artists admit that they are ‘interested not in mystification as such, but rather in researching mystical knowledge and mysticism without sacralisation’, which is "a quick understanding of things through various contexts — an extension of intuitive knowledge".

This current era in which everyone is overwhelmed by a massive production and dissemination of information highly influenced by machine intelligence has prompted ASI to explore the aesthetic possibilities of knowledge. They view historical and cultural ruptures as "a chance for a new subjectivity" and an opportunity to "get out of that narrow corridor of true or false". Surrounded by ongoing and upcoming global catastrophes, they are using this confusion and fear to study and observe the transformation of epistemology. At the start of their activities in 2015 the duo organised the Apocalyptological Congress at the Fabrika art centre in Moscow, where they shared their new approach – apocalyptology.

Shuripa and Titova see huge potential in chaos and view the tragic history of the 20th century as a theme park navigating through reality and fiction, and the conscious and subconscious. In 2019 for the 5th Ural Industrial Biennale they explored an imaginary phenomenon called ultra-fast sleep, which supposedly occurs when a person blinks. Titled ‘The Dream Life’ project, they focused on the human subconsciousness. ASI believes that the mysticism that was so popular at the beginning of the 20th century has continued to be incorporated into mass culture over the years, and that we are still under its influence today.

In 2023 the Agency published ‘The Botanical-Political Dictionary’ as the fruits of an interest in secret unions which merge with imaginary worlds. They created this book during ongoing research in the Baltic Art Center artist residency on the island of Gotland in 2022-2023. The duo was trying to define the notion of expanded documentality by introducing a secret language of flowers devised for coded communication on political subjects. It was constructed not as a gerbarium or bestiary but as a real dictionary, where such political concepts as ‘liberalism’, ‘civil disobedience’, ‘manipulation’ and ‘silent majority’ are associated with a particular flower. The Agency creates a mystical relation between mint oil and the liberal mind, an orchid fragrance as the surrender of weapons. They dive into the botanical world not in order to find an Aesopian language as in ‘Pictures from the Insects' Life’ (1921) by Karel and Josef Čapek, but to construct other epistemological dimensions. The Agency’s dictionary is conceptually closer to a famous 15th Voynich manuscript, about which researchers still debate whether it was written in a natural or an artificial language. Covered with unidentified plants and astrological symbols this ancient manuscript continues to inspire an ongoing interest towards a mystical mindset and knowledge.

Their current exhibition in Paris, 'Another Life of Grete S', forms part of a broader research project entitled 'The Park of Mind Revolutions', which they began in 2022. The ASI explains that they aim to "unveil the ideas of prophecies" through three female characters: Aglaya, Barbara, and Grete. The Paris show at Iragui demonstrates Grete S.'s prophecies, beliefs, and thoughts about the future. Her full name is Grete Samsa, the younger sister of Gregor Samsa from Kafka's famous 1915 novella ‘The Metamorphosis’. The Agency of Singular Investigations brings her to life and shares her vision of the future. According to Grete, humans will transform into super-insects, united by a collective intelligence. In the centre of the exhibition we see a reconstruction of a conceptual planetary city that these new species will populate.

Presented as an archive supposedly discovered by scouts for the Agency, the artefacts depict various versions of the future. Although found documents bring us back to the past, the focus is on utopias and prophecies. By placing their works between the past and the future, the ASI wishes to demonstrate that nothing is linear. Their first attempt at creating a confused timeline was in the 2014 ‘Observatorium’ project shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA) and at Manifesta 10 in St Petersburg, which presented a ‘personal museum’ belonging to an unknown conspiracy theorist. Other projects include ‘Flower Power. Archive’ at the 1st Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2018 and at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in 2019, which showed the life of a fictional secret organisation in the late Soviet Union. "Time today resembles a crystal that grows in various directions", notes the ASI, comparing it to the script for a TV series where, through memories or dreams, characters can travel back and forth in time, and where real and virtual temporalities are mixed together.

While observing the found documents in the show we bump into a small room with weird metal pieces hanging from the ceiling. They might be found in Grete S.’s hotel room, which was transformed into a cocoon-like space. As Kabakov’s 1984 iconic work ‘The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment’, ASI demonstrates that any journey in time and space may be done without needing to leave your own room.

At the heart of the Agency's interests lies this auxiliary movement, traversing the realms of the imaginary and the real. The artists continued their observations during their project ‘On New Thinking. And Other Forgotten Dreams’ at the Secession in Vienna in 2023, where among other things they focused on what they called “bureaucratic magic" and as they put it "its capacities to create and erase realities". The roots of this fascination with the aesthetics of bureaucracy can be traced not only to Kafka but to Moscow conceptualism, which used Soviet bureaucracy language as a tool. For Titova and Shuripa ‘language today is the most powerful force and has unprecedented power’. They remind us that the digital revolution of the 20th century was also a revolution of language with historical and technological mutations of language producing new realities.

On the current show we see numerous financial documents under plexiglas, covered with drawings of the super-insects. Those creatures from a remote future are looking at these old documents, creating an intriguing temporal tension.