The videos in Olga Kisseleva’s ‘Precarity of the Artist’ exhibition shows us a number of young artists who have failed to have a place in today’s world of art, and thus continuing to be artist while working in a temporary workplace. They bend and look at the life lived in this double life.
The videos focus on the precarity concept, which is inserted in the present daily life, as a lifestyle existing in the neoliberal social position that is called biopolitics by Michel Foucault. First of all, they represent that the working conditions of the works called ‘temporary’ or ‘student jobs’ are now an integral part of the normal life. And it highlights that this situation the present-day employees have started to come up against throughout the life is now true for the art as well.
When we follow the artist-student examples in the precarity life Olga Kisseleva show us, we see that, when the artists manage to think as an artist anywhere and in any situation, they manage to continue and perform art in a different environment as well. They underline that art is not only related to professionalism, but rather it is a way of thinking and a lifestyle. In this sense, while showing us this situation ironically on the one hand, they offer us a positive look on the hand. They do affirm not the situation, but the potentials of the energetic power in that situation. They present the power of a great example of optimism by reminding merrily that even the most unfortunate and desperate situation might accommodate a great intellectual and artistic power; and compel us to think on it, allow us to gain a new viewpoint.
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