Olga Chernysheva. Compossibilities
The book, published together with Olga Chernysheva’s solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle (Museum of Figurative Arts) in Erfurt in 2013.
Olga Chernysheva, an artist, graduated from VGIK (the State Institute of Cinematography) in 1986 and the State Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam in 1996. She freely combines a whole range of media in her work: drawings, paintings, photographs, audio-visual installations and films.
Olga Chernysheva finds art in the everyday, her multimedia works tells us about the outskirts, market sellers, workers, the homeless. Unlike 19th Century Russian realism, Chernysheva’s work is not based on social criticism, rather she finds a way of making varying and opposing statements, points of view, mindsets exist side by side.
The main part of the book documents the photographs, drawings, graphic works and video art that Olga Chernysheva has produced since 1990. The book also contains an interview with the artist, essays by Boris Groys and Silke Opitz, the curators of Olga Chernysheva’s exhibition Compossibilities which took place at the Kunsthalle in Erfurt from July 4 until 23 August 2013.
For Chernysheva, art is not just something that people — including the artist herself — practice in diverse ways and can therefore also discover in everyday life. Art is a medium used to write history, and thus a means — generally and specifically, socially and individually — for people to preserve themselves, while they transmit a sense of themselves to others. Art makes it possible to expend time, to focus on small events, and to make them visible — in slow motion, as it were – in order to trust them ultimately once again to the stream of history, which transports some things slower, and some things faster.