Olga Chernysheva
Part of a generation of artists whose work emerged in Russia in the 1990s, Olga Chernysheva has, from the outset, created work that is intimate and feminist, understated and socially engaged. The first Russian artist to be accepted into the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, she also studied film at the Moscow Film Academy. Whilst the media Olga Chernysheva employs vary from project to project – ranging from documentary video to photography, from slideshows to watercolour – her chosen subject remains the same: how to bear witness to Russia in the post-communist era.
Both critical and contemplative, and rich in references, her work explores universal themes such as loneliness, invisible labour, rural exodus and isolation, with the harshness of everyday life in the former Soviet Union serving as a common thread.
To Moscow, for instance, is a series of portraits of bus drivers from Central Asia. The artist captures the melancholic faces of this community as they travel across Russia, driving their passengers towards the capital. Through Olga Chernysheva’s lens, these ‘invisible’ communities – museum attendants, migrant workers, street vendors and anonymous passers-by – are transformed into ordinary heroes, conveying the image of a society where everything seems frozen in the past. With realism, the artist’s work documents a society crushed by the lack of prospects for the future.
