The “Present Past” exhibition by Olga Chernysheva features a collection of new works that the artist describes in the following way: “The series are brought together by psychological and visual imagery, with human loneliness in a closed space being the leitmotif of their unity. There’s always a human figure in the frame. The characters could be either restrained by the interior circumstances or lost in a space of enormous scale but they’re always on their own”. The project is comprised of a few photographic series and a video installation. Series of black-and-white photographs “ Guards” (2009) and “Cactus Seller” (2009) represent characters that have become subjects of the artist’s endless scrutiny and sympathy. Here as well she’s focused not so much on the spatial-plastic relationships of the figure and its social background as on meditative scrutiny of the weird atmospherics around the characters who seem to be encapsulated within the worlds of their own, enclosed alone with themselves and therefore locked for the direct glance and direct identification. The viewer is engaged into a kind of a nearly unreal environment reminiscent of the aesthetic space in the early films of David Lynch. According to art critic Boris Grois “Chernysheva is getting increasingly involved in documenting lives of people whose job consists in doing nothing: like men who do ice fishing in winter and for hours sit motionlessly on a frozen river, or security guards whose only job is to watch intently while remaining still in one place. These ordinary folks embody various modi of contemplative life (vita contemplativa). This contemplative life finds itself in the very midst of feverish urban life, and contemporary intellectuals are inherently incapable of it”. One of central works in the exhibition is video piece “L’intermittence du Coeur” (Heart Intermissions). It is commissioned by the ARTiculate Fund and is based on the famous 19th century Russian painting “Encore, more Encore!” by Pavel Fedotov. In search for her own aesthetic genealogy Olga Chernysheva for quite some time has been trying to find correlations between her method of artistic reflection and Fedotov’s classical works - her graduation thesis at the VGIK (Russian Film Academy) was dedicated to the study of his art. She was fascinated not so much by realistic aspects of the genre painting but by Fedotov’s odd poetic melancholy, his concentration on the trivia, monotony, and ennui. This aspect of everyday existence is directly related to Foucault’s “hermeneutics of the subject”, to practices of self-reflection, “caring about your own self”, to what Foucault calls “spiritual exercises”. The philosopher’s thought is focused on one single problem: how do these self-techniques work? Are we capable of grasping our subjectivity as an object which we “create” throughout our life? Seemingly senseless and monotonous play with the poodle in Fedotov’s painting and in Chernysheva’s video installation is directly referred to what Foucault called “being with your own self”, i.e. to the same practices which since the times of antiquities were related to divine existence as such. Divinity in the absence of God, a caesura of a kind, a pause in the fabric of life, monotonous essence of everyday existence – this is the message of Fedotov’s painting for Chenysheva. But her video is not just a replica or an animated cameo to “Encore!”. The poodle’s monotonous jumps in the video are interrupted, the rhythm is replaced by arrhythmia which, as much as cardiac arrhythmia, in an entirely different way intones the whole visual space and emphasises the protagonist’s solitude.