The Agency of Singular Investigations

The Agency of Singular Investigations (Stanislav Shuripa, Anna Titova) is an artistic research platform established by Anna Titova and Stanislav Shuripa in 2014. Their projects are constructed situations in which fiction becomes fact through documents. The agency employs the language of bureaucracy and takes it to the point of absurdity by building a hierarchy and scrupulous fictional institutionality, by turning artists into agency ‘employees’ and by relying on the archive as the main form which literally substitutes all other artistic practices. Their Dystopia Park (2015) draws on a recently found archive of an unknown institution to prove that present-day Moscow is, in fact, all new construction in the crater of a giant meteorite that had apparently destroyed the original city.

In Dark Matter. Political Philosophy of a Brushstroke, Social History of Fear (2016) the agency in collaboration with the Centre for Secret History Studies examines the Moscow Museum of Modern Art collection, approaching art works as indicators of societal emotions. Addressing corporate aesthetics and conspiracy theories, the agency creates a framework for the development of a new branch of knowledge across pseudoscientific disciplines and humanitarian subjects. These borrowings and juxtapositions allow the singularity of an art work to show through and bring into focus the artistic language in relation to its context. (Elena Ishchenko)