At a window cut through a blank wall sits a middle aged woman. Hands clasped on the desk in front of her, she sits against a backdrop of winter fur coats, waiting for museum visitors to discard or reclaim their possessions. She is the cloakroom attendant inside the Moscow Natural History Museum depicted by Olga Chernysheva in one of her Cactus Seller light boxes, and one of the many whose pseudo- authoritative function illustrates the hangover of a former era so frequently the subject of the Russian Chernysheva's work.
In the Cactus Seller we see muted snapshots of a museum and its exhibits collecting dust. Amongst them works an ageing man, the cactus seller, tending his mini cacti amidst stuffed snakes and birds and skeletons in cages, his only customers the school groups which now make up the majority of the museum's visitors. At first glance he seems a comic figure, existing outside of time and place. We become a voyeur, watching him unobserved; it's a little like glancing into homes through lit, uncurtained windows whilst on a night time walk.
In these light boxes, Olga shows us three eras of Russia existing side by side: First the grand museum from Imperialist times with decorative wall paintings and patterned tiled floors. This then covered by functional boarding and furniture from communist days, and now set against evidence of today's post-communist enterprise of the cactus seller struggling to make a living on his own. Are perhaps the cactus seller's care for his miniature charges and the museum's care for its dusty specimens a metaphor for life today in post-communist Russia? Are these light boxes perhaps hinting at a desire to preserve a way of life that has past?
In another of her works, the watercolour Market Stalls and Vendors Olga Chernysheva depicts stallholders alongside their stalls and goods. Here she watches and records a way of life prevalent in Moscow today, but also one that is disappearing as global corporations and brands force homogenisation upon society.
Olga Chernysheva's work captures the turbulence of Russian life in today's post-communist era. Communism provided a shared future, a security for the Russian people, the loss of which has hit the older generation particularly hard. With no social security and few ways of making a living now that small enterprises are being stamped out, these people have been set adrift and left to fend for themselves. In the west we've been taught to see the removal of the communist regime as wholly a good thing, but in actuality I don't believe it's as simple as this. During one of my lunchtime tours I was told by a lady who lived in Russia that many impoverished elderly are forced out onto street corners to sell their personal possessions, crockery, pots and blankets in a desperate attempt to make ends meet.
Since hearing this I've begun to read more onto Olga's work: the cactus seller's slightly comical enterprise has turned into an enterprising bid for survival; the market stall vendors seem increasingly without hope for Olga told us that often it's too cold for any passerby to stop and buy anything. So for me Olga's work takes on a new poignancy. It's about the survival of a people; a recording of the passing of an old way of life. I wonder how much longer this old way can continue? In this rapidly changing world how can these people manage to exist?
I took a tour around the exhibition a couple of weeks ago and one person saw a similar sense of dispair in the Kyrgysz artists' piece 'A New Silk Road'.
The bitter irony is the number of Russian oligarchs who have sprung up since the Soviet Union was dissolved, many now living in London, or 'Moscow on Thames' as it is also known.
Posted by: Katherine Bujalska | 13 May 2010 at 02:52 PM