Anastasia Galicheva

A Conversation is a space that invites the audience to immerse themselves within the conflicted thoughts of one Russian woman living in Britain, whose cultural identity and place in the world is challenged. She debates the influences and impacts of media propaganda, the nostalgia for an increasingly aestheticised past and the implications of both the British and Russian contemporary political climates on her decisions about belonging. The multimedia installation discusses how immigrants often have to choose to adopt the ‘host’ culture or abstain from it all together, thus existing in between and belonging to neither.

The script of A Conversation is based on Anastasia’s video work Port of Last Departure, a series of interviews documenting the generational shifts in cultural identity through a conversation with one family. The work explored how context, personal journeys and interactions can shape the complexities of our cultural identities. Each individual forms their own container of identity through memories, food, language, customs and people.

Building on the research around shifting identities, Stilyagi is a typeface family based upon Cyrillic letterforms from Slavic calligraphy. While functioning as latin letterforms, Stilyagi maintains its slavic roots, expressing the same sense of displacement felt by immigrants who have adopted another culture yet retain an undeniable sense of otherness.