Olga Kisseleva

Chateau de Gentilly - FRAC (Contemporary Art Foundation) of Ile-de-France presets the new Olga Kisseleva's solo exhibition EDEN from September 1st to October 10th in Paris.

The artiste Olga Kisseleva works of bringing extinct species back to life, or of creating new species on the preexisting base of DNA. A truly artistic utopia, assuming that extinction, can be revoked thanks to the advancement of contemporary human civilisation.

Nowadays, a lot of extinct vegetable and animal species can be classified as being “physically extinct, but not genetically”. These species have disappeared as a result of global warming and its immediate consequences on their natural habitat and their living conditions. Their DNA has nevertheless been safeguarded and preserved in laboratories or museums, and can therefore be reactivated by scientists. Thanks to the advancement made through research in the domain of genetic technology, DNA can be used as a base in the rebirth of the species to which it belongs, the exception being with the dna of animals who lived a very long time ago. That of dinosaurs being a good example; they are classified as being “physically and genetically extinct”.

One of the directions explored by bio-art and the artist Olga Kisseleva is the possibility of bringing extinct species back to life, or of creating new species on the preexisting base of DNA. A truly artistic utopia, assuming that extinction, despite its supposedly definitive and irreversible characteristic, can be revoked thanks to the advancement of contemporary human civilisation. the realization of this utopia therefore allows for the preservation of biological diversity, the reestablishment of weakened ecosystems and the deletion imagined by the damage caused to nature by man.

The subject – Cash – reveals the conflict between a wish to create a relationship of trust between each other and to survive under new conditions of total market networks. Within the framework of the declared subject it is planned to define a sphere of real authentic human values appropriate for everybody – in small local places and in the global situation of today.

The main project of the Biennale includes 34 artists from Russia, Austria, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, France, Sweden, the USA, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Singapore, Australia. Apart from the Nomadic Show the main project presents the exhibitions “Cash”, “History of Shiryaevo Biennale”, music event and a special program for children.

In the framework of the special program two exhibitions will be held in Samara: “CASH — from Symbol and Dream to Hard Core Reality" curated by Martin Schibli in Samara Regional Museum of Art (opening date – August 24th) and “The New Ecology” curated by Vitaly Patsukov in Samara Regional History and Local Lore Museum named after P.V. Alabin (opening date – August 25th). The seminar “On Museum of the Intangible” will be carried out on August 28th- 30th at Shiryaevo Community Centre and in Samara (at the Factory Kitchen, in Samara Regional Museum of Art and in Samara Regional History and Local Lore Museum).

The Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon (Sete, France) is devoting a monographic exhibition to Kisseleva, the pioneering Franco-Russian artist in digital art.

The SEA VIEW project has nothing to do with holidays, nor with a pleasant coastal address. It is a scientific project based on collaboration between the artist-explorer and the researchers of the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and environmental NGOs. Through her ultra-technological installations, the artist applies three resolutely contemporary methods to marine backgrounds: data visualisation, the study of consumerism, and its consequences, and a foreshadowing of the future.

The artist

Olga Kisseleva is one of that first generation of Perestroïka, who contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the raising of the Iron Curtain. Her installations, photographs, videos and paintings deal with the mixing of cultures, mingling of languages, new technologies, and shifting social relationships.

She founded the Art&Science laboratory, which plays a pioneering role in the area of contemporary creation of research and thought on emerging forms of creativity.

The work of Olga Kisseleva interweaves activities which take place in urban settings or online with interventions in galleries and museums. Her work has been shown at the National Centre for Contemporary Art (Moscow, Russia), the ARC (Paris, France), Kiasma (Helsinki, Finland), at the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid, Spain), at the biennial exhibitions of Venice, Istanbul, Dakar, Tirana, Rennes and Moscow.

Olga Kisseleva began her career as an artist in France in 1998 when she took part in the collective exhibition Cet été-là (That Summer) at CRAC LR (Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain [Languedoc Roussillon]) in Sète.

The work

The world of digital science, nanotechnology and coded messages comes visibly to life in the work of Olga Kisseleva.

Strange objects and astonishing arrangements give form to the artist’s installations and only reveal their mysteries to curious visitors. Then they can access an invisible world, populated by figures, numbers, line codes, through which time flows and is traded at a crazy speed like a commodity on the stock exchange. Olga Kisseleva’s work question our relationship with the world in a hyper-connected society of excessive consumption.

It is her openness to the world which enables Kisseleva to create a repertoire of her own. Using images, words and concepts, she invents a universal and inter-disciplinary language which crosses our societies, in which everyone recognises himself as a wise explorer of current affairs.

Her work aims to make what she observes intelligible and captures what surrounds her. Like breathing, her inspiration comes from this world, inhabits it and keeps it awake then gushes forth again towards the other.

Her works therefore straddle the human and social sciences, as well as those related to nature. It is a work of meetings with the space we live in and with ourselves. It is also an awareness of the individual experience within the collective, which sets experience and memory as tools capable of representing our body and its social effects in the present. It is a world in which we evolve, made sensitive through paying increasing attention to the emotional and sensory dimensions of social facts.

The 7th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology: « Re: Act 2017 » will take place in Sorbonne, Paris.

The conference will discuss the status of socio-spatial key categories such as space, place, territory, borders, movement and mobility. Adams and Jansson (2012) discuss five such trends, which indicate the close relationship between mediatisation and socio-spatial transformations:

« • Mediated/mediatized mobility, which blurs the distinctions between texts and contexts; between symbolic and material spaces, and makes the settings of media use (production and consumption) increasingly fluid.

• Technological convergence, which makes various kinds of content flow more or less frictionless between and across platforms and spaces.

• Interactivity, which dissolves some of the lines of division between producers and consumers, and displaces the position of the ‘‘author.’’

• New interfaces, through which the user’s interaction with the media may come closer to the body, whereas the mutual adaptation of software and user leads to various representational extensions of the Self.

• Automation of surveillance, through which the distinctions between those watching and those being watched partly dissolve, and user-generated data, which affect the spacing and timing of social practices, circulate through more or less diffuse, de-territorialized assemblages. »

In "Climatic Meridien", show with Olga Kisseleva, Olafur Eliasson, Wen Fanng, Art Orienté Objet, Labofactory, Lucy+Jorge Orta, Benjamin Sabatier, Toma Saraceno, Taryn Simon, Jean-Luc Vilmouth in the frame of COP21, Sorbonne, Paris.