Inside the pavilion, a wall panel entitled A Trip to the Imperial Capital (2011) by a Viennese artists’ collective exposed capitalist neo-coloniality across the former-East, by charting the role played by foundations such as Soros and Erste in re-writing central European art history since 1989. Nearby, a can of spray-paint and a stencil, propped casually up against a wall, became another talking point. The stencil, also sprayed on the wall above, read Wash Your Dirty Money With My Art. János Sugár’s piece was conceived as an interactive offering. People could take the stencil, use it to spray the sign wherever they liked, and bring it back. In so doing, they marked their solidarity with the artist’s right to freedom of expression – a freedom whose limits, in the Hungarian context, were rendered very clear when, after spraying his invocation on the walls of two cultural institutions in Budapest in 2008, the artist was sued and landed a five year jail sentence (later suspended).

 
Sugár’s dramatic story echoed the story of Adamciak’s precarious existence on the margins of provincial Slovakia. In a piece called Trans-Action. Altruism as Art – Art as Philanthropy. Social Sculpture vs. Social Care, the younger artist Michal Murin described the perpetuities that led him to raise money to buy Adamciak a house near the mountains, when he discovered, in 2005, that his older colleague was destitute. Murin describes his form of Social Sculpture as a ‘targeted, rational, managerial intervention’ simulating ‘the role of a private gallery manager’ in a country with an inadequate cultural infrastructure. Its goal? To enable an important artist, in danger of being forgotten artist, but once a key player, to reappear on the art scene, and to survive, in real terms. Murin’s pragmatism makes for an interesting dialogue with the Viennese critique of private capital’s interventions in the cultural field.
 
For all the concerns it brought to the fore, the show suggested restorative potentialities. And for the early birds, there was even pre-congress peace on offer, as each day began at 7am with an hour-long meditation designed ‘to remove all fears and fulfil all wishes’ in a Japanese garden. The sessions were led by U We Claus, a member of the FREE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY collective, and one-time collaborator of Joseph Beuys. It was perhaps the collective’s other member, Anna Tretter, who provided the punctum of the exhibition, however: an extraordinary video examining the archive of journalist Erich Everth – a forgotten Weimar Republic critic of Nazism. Echoes of a darker history haunting Central Europe lent the contemporary themes in the show disturbing depth.
 
 
10×10: See You There was on show 8 – 11 September 2011 (visit www.culturecongress.eu).

On Duty leads to the series Guard (2009). This time, security personnel are shown standing. We do not know whether they are in the business of protecting property or safeguarding lives, and it does not matter. This is a reworking of the German photo-documentary tradition of classifying subjects according to their trade. But Chernysheva produces difference rather than similarity, deliberately failing to provide evidence for the physiological characteristics of a type. The guards are a diverse assortment of men, formally unified only by virtue of appearing alone in the work-spaces that frame them. It is a moving study of alienated labour and masculinity, of resilience, resignation, and withdrawal, induced by hours of standing. The men’s body language is unnervingly revealing as we scrutinize their shyness or bravado.

 
Russian Museum (2003) is screened on a loop in the adjacent room, its mesmerising but melancholic ‘zen meditation exercises’ spilling out of that space. Through Chernysheva’s lens we look into people’s thoughts as they look, reflected in the glass. We see them gazing into exquisite 19th century genre scenes and landscapes, oblivious to a patriotic guide’s running commentary, recorded on location. The guide confidently offers a collage of didactic absurdities alternating between the meaningless, the offhand, and the outrageous: ‘the psychology of art is inseparable from geography, do you understand?’; ‘only the warmth of Greece could produce such an upspring of human creativity’; ‘humanity is still chewing over these achievements like a piece of chewing gum’. But this is not what people see in these paintings. They lose themselves. Represented and lived time fuse: an ancient guard taps her feet, an adolescent girl in beige earnestly scans the flesh-coloured brushstrokes of a painted child’s cheek. Visual silence successfully exceeds the din of museum traffic. The contemplation of masterpieces is best pursued in isolation, and the museum, such as it is, is clearly poorly suited to providing the conditions for individual communion. The privileged pursuit of the contemplative life necessitates an extensive economy of guards. There are multiple museum attendants, and soldiers laughing and stamping their feet outside in the snow. But if guards and attendants are everywhere, they seem too halfhearted in their presence to proliferate and to become the nightmare they do in Kafka’s trilogy. They are just workers wrestling with boredom until they go home at the end of their day.
 
Installed diagonally in the basement, we find black and white photographs from the Moscow Zoo museum in light boxes, themselves like artefacts. Amongst images of prehistoric skeletons and delicate boxes of dead birds are photographs of a spectacled man busying himself with something from behind a strip-lit tank full of cactuses. The hero of Cactus Seller (2009) has set up shop in the museum and tends his treasures against a backdrop of frescoes resembling one of Komar and Melamid’s Most Wanted series – oversized stags in action, pictured in a forest landscape. The cactus tank is a microcosm in a nest of parallel realities: the world of the tank, then the bizarre world of the museum, then the strangeness of post-Soviet Moscow. Inside, life carries on calmly, at many removes from what others, outside, might think of as reality. Time does not stop in these worlds, it carries on. Nothing much changes here. The metro attendant below the ground, the guard above ground, the cactus seller, the melancholic inhabitant of the one-room apartment in Chernysheva’s reworking of Pavel Fedotov’s painting of someone lounging in bed holding out a stick for a dog to leap over (Intermissions of the Heart [2009]), the market stallholders in the watercolour series Blue-Yellow (2009); each an island in an invisible market that has been edited out of the scene – these characters exist within their own reality. Chernysheva respectfully studies these isolated experiences. Whether society is broken or the individual has been liberated from belonging to a type is left as an open question. To each her own reality, for now.

 
Olga Chernysheva was on show at Calvert 22, 1 July – 29 August 2010.