Borrowing from moments of history, literature, and counter-cultural movements, Ola Vasiljeva creates imaginary environments in which sculpture, drawing, video and found objects commingle. The props and furnishings in her installation often evince an alive disorderliness, as though they stood surrogates for the offstage characters to whom their existence seemingly testifies. As if theatre sets at intermission, my environments are often littered with telling clues of unseen performances, obscure and often absurd activities.

For her exhibition in Brest, the artist is based on Zefiro Torna, one of Monteverdi’s madrigals, in which human feelings are expressed, from the lightest to the deepest, embodied in a music of astonishing modernity. Far from putting into music the Italian master’s play, Ola Vasiljeva interprets what happens – or can happen – on the other side of the backdrop behind the scenes, corridors, backstages… She does not unfold a story or an action but lets them glimpse, incomplete, unfinished or unresolved as if what is to be played here was claimed by space itself. In a poetic disorder where works find their place as intuitively as spontaneously, the exhibition is alive and moving. Artist, works and viewers then take part of the same community to produce a supposedly hidden meaning.