[spectre] THE SEVEN DEADLY DESIRES (Larissa Andreeva)

[geert]

From: Larissa Andreeva <larissa.andreeva at mail.ru>
Subject: THE SEVEN DEADLY DESIRES
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2004 14:15:55 +0200

THE SEVEN DEADLY DESIRES
by Olga Kisseleva

in CITY OF WOMEN

________________________________________________________________________
Olga Kisseleva's work Seven Deadly Desires began in 2002 with a series 
of video interviews with teenagers in Saint-Ouen, France about their 
hopes and dreams. Well aware of the impact of multi-national companies 
in framing their consumer desires, the teenagers frequently referred to 
McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Nike and BMW. The media fuelled their aspirations 
to sing like Jennifer Lopez or play football like Zidane. They wanted 
to live in luxurious palaces (or at least flats where people did not 
urinate on the staircases). Their aspirations were more than just 
material, as they also wanted medical care to be accessible to all, to 
give money to the poor, to stop all wars and end pollution. 
Interviewing teenagers in other cities, it became clear to the artist 
that this generation shared a collective vision of the future, but it 
was one based on the idea that good health came through body-building; 
fame was always associated with money, and power with stock options or 
the ability to eliminate your enemies in great numbers in a videogame 
fight. Their desires in one sense became more and more virtual, 
medialised and remote from their daily realities. Kisseleva's 
posters/digital prints and her video animation were her critical 
response to listening to these teenagers. In these elements of the 
work, she exposes/explodes this generation's mythology, while exploring 
their fantasy world, leaving us with a serious moral question about the 
relationship between trans-national, media-fuelled desires and modern 
sins. Or, expressed in another way, what is true (morally good) and 
false in both our realities and our aspirations when they are so 
saturated by the values of late consumer capitalism and a globalised 
multi-national culture? In her animation, Pascal's experiment with a 
barrel and vertical tube is used as a metaphor for the pressures 
exerted in modern life if fed only by the seven deadly desires she has 
identified.

"The Seven Deadly Desires" is a part of "Dreams of the Future" curated 
by Katy Deepwell
Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia
01.10. - 22.10

co-production: City of Women, Ljubljana, Mains d'Oeuvres, Paris, 
Synesthesie, Paris
Olga Kisseleva is represented by Quang Gallery, Paris

http://www.cityofwomen-a.si
http://www.kisseleva.org