Olga Kisseleva, From the series Double vie (Museum / Museum)

Double Life, with its videos and photographs, highlights the insanity of a society where passion is lived aside when necessity forces us to “choose” a bread winning job.

“My double life” is a video installation made up of several diptychs. All individuals divide their lives into a professional activity performed in order to survive, and their true skills that are unrelated to work. The diptychs show the schizophrenic everyday lives of people swinging between necessity and passion, between a world of work and a domestic world: an art history student who works in a fast food restaurant, an artist on a supermarket check-out, a committed environmentalist who delivers freebies. Their lives provide concrete evidence of the threat of alienation at work because of the obligation to do a job that has not been freely chosen. No way out? Is there a cut off between what we’d like to do and what we have to do? Nonetheless, these people do manage odd moments of selfexpression: witness the example of the young artist who uses the cash register bills for his own artistic purposes.

How does society identify the characters in “My double life”? An artist who does a job or a worker who creates works of art on the side? What value is given to such ‘parallel’ activities? Olga Kisseleva is up front in demonstrating how difficult it is to be in such a position, yet also reveals an indomitable creative force.