Order in post-communist Russia is porous, reliable legal norms are lacking, and re-drawn borders fragment social life. Grey zones of diffuse desolation exist alongside enclaves of extreme wealth.

In one of her series of light boxes, Olga Chernysheva shows improvised fences made of tin and barbed wire that barricade privatised plots of land on the edges of Moscow. Perhaps green oases will come into being here? The fences are metaphors for the aggressiveness of a defensive isolation typically found in a neoliberal situation. In Moscow too, prosperous people live ever more increasingly in gated communities that promise security. Individual freedom is neither safeguarded nor stable by any means in this transitional Russian society.

Since graduating from the Moscow University of Film in 1986, Chernysheva, who also lived in Amsterdam in the early nineties, has concerned herself in her drawings, paintings and photographs with everyday, but socially significant, situations at the lower end of the traditional aesthetic scale. These works were inspired by illustrations in cookbooks or the design of confectionary items, and show just how diverse identity ascriptions can be when derived from the material and patterns of knitted woollen hats.

Wolfgang Kos, 2005 (translation: Tim Sharp)