Olga Chernysheva / Anna Jermolaewa

“The most interesting thing in my work,” says Chernysheva, “is continually revealing something new in what has long seemed familiar – something usually concealed in the most banal objects. ‘The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact. It is our arms and legs, our pots and pans, that are indefinable’, as G.K. Chesterton writes in his biography of Charles Dickens.” Chernysheva takes the term “artist’s territory” as a working hypothesis. Our own territory is the startingpoint for excursions, as well as the background against which we see everything else. Our view expands when we leave our familiar territory. Just as architects looking at a building will see the tension and the statics, so artists perceive the tensions in their surroundings; they recognise imitation, inconsistency, signs of disintegration. They see how social phenomena become visible, susceptible of expression by visual means. Chernysheva works with a variety of media: video, photography, drawing, painting, objects. “But my favourite medium is drawing,” she says. “For me, the process of drawing with the eye is the most intriguing."