Olga Michi is an artist working in the field of contemporary digital art. She is the author of the idea of creating cinematographic projects. In her work Olga follows the traditions of Western European art, especially the creative approach of the masters of the Düsseldorf school of photography. Michi’s works touch upon a wide range of themes, which are devoted both to actual problems of modern life and deep philosophical issues. Michi’s artistic projects are based on photographic images that go through many stages of creative, conceptual and technical processing to become finished works of art that form thematic series. The high level of technical execution of Michi’s works of art is ensured by the support of a team of dedicated specialists, be it at the stage of preparing images, printing final prints, publishing author’s albums, carrying out exhibition projects or fulfilling the stages of film production.

One of Olga’s projects, ‘The Vulnerable’, is devoted to the problem of preserving the culture of the peoples of the North, Asia and Africa, whose traditions grotesquely converge with the innovations of modern European civilisation. The project received international recognition after the publication of the book of the same name ‘Vulnerable’ by the German publisher teNeues in English and German. The book has received favourable reviews in more than 10 leading European publications including Stern, Daily Mail, XLSemanal, Digital Camera and others. The British magazine Amateur Photographer has named Vulnerable the best recent book from the world of photography.

The works of the project ‘Deity’s Likeness’ use various means of expression that, in their multimedia synthesis, provide an opportunity to highlight the problem of what deity is and how its representation is transformed by socio-cultural changes. The use of neural network creative tools in the project is not limited to two-dimensional digital artworks. The project also includes dynamic compositions that combine the aesthetics of static easel painting with the animation possibilities of video art, as well as works with holographic effects that explore the boundary between planar and plastic arts.

Michi’s film “In the Shadow of Big Trees” has been recognised at international festivals in the USA, Germany and the Czech Republic. In “Missing Girls”, the artist raises the acute social problem of economic sexual slavery in provincial society in India and takes a step towards finding ways to overcome this situation.

Biography
Born in 1982, Havana, Cuba
Lives and works in Moscow, Russia
– 2011 – 2014 photo correspondent for TASS
– 2014 – 2016 Journalist, presenter of the TV programme ‘Extreme Photographer’ Zhivaya Planeta, Russia.
– 2016 Production of the documentary ‘Massai: from sand to snow’ for Russia Today
– 2016 Production of the documentary ‘Little People Big Trees’ for Russia Today
– 2017-2019 Working on the feature project ‘Vulnerable’
– 2017 Production of the documentary film ‘Missing Girls’
– 2019-2021 Working on the feature project ‘Deity’s Likeness’
– 2020 Production of the documentary film ‘My Friend Yeti’
– 2020-2023 Creation of the art group GrOM and work on the project ‘Future Dwelling’
– 2021 Production of the documentary film ‘Torn Off’
Education
– 2003 Moscow Academy of Economics and Law
– 2006 Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia

Alexander Borovsky about Olga Michi:
Olga Michi’s creative formation turned out to be surprisingly rich. For ten years she has managed to work as a photo correspondent for TASS, as a TV presenter to implement the author’s project ‘Extreme Photographer’, to become a prominent profile blogger, to prove herself in travel photography by preparing several large-scale exhibitions, to shoot a number of documentary films, to engage in publishing, to create the Centre of Visual Culture ‘Beton’ and to conduct several important curatorial projects in it.
All of her activities have been successful: her blog has gained a passionate audience, her photo exhibitions have been shown in several important museums, her films have won awards, and the public interested in visual arts has concentrated around ‘Beton’.
Such dense, concentrated self-realisation requires not only traditional personal and creative qualities. There are moments that are purely modern, related to logistics, technological equipment, communicative practices, art production skills.
And something else, moments that are difficult to verbalise. I’ll try, though. After all, these are the things that contribute to the transition of O. Michi, who has achieved a lot in the spheres of activity described above, into a new hypostasis: the space of contemporary art.
In general, such a transition is quite rare. It requires overcoming professional stereotypes.

One of Olga Michi’s best known exhibitions is called Vulnerable. In contrast, I would call Olga Michie herself, in her creative capacity, invulnerable. The point is not only that, working in, so to speak, an extreme field, she has experienced a lot of dangerous moments: ‘solving’ an unexpected conflict with the chief of the Papuan cow tribe, staying in the wilds of Guatemala, filming the Nile crocodiles in their natural environment require certain qualities of character. But even more important is this. The ‘travel and adventure’ format imposes certain genre requirements. A war journalist is not expected to make philosophical generalisations. A photo-documentalist is not expected to make visual representations. Masters of street photography and landscape photographers differ not only in subject matter, but also in language and expressive means.
Accordingly, professional photojournalism has developed certain genre approaches. Of course, these are not trivial angles and favourable spectacle situations, modern optics brightens up ‘common places’. But there are professional stereotypes.

So, O. Michi turned out to be surprisingly invulnerable to the stereotypes of ethnographic photography. To what can be called ‘the rules of shooting’: the grasping of event, geographical, ethnographic, ethnic series, compositional, technical and other developments. This is already evident in her documentary films. O. Michi works meaningfully with different genre settings: documentary-ethnographic, narrative and other. Thus, in the film ‘In the Shadow of Big Trees’ a unique ethnographic series: the life of a remote Pygmy village, trades, archaic ways of subsistence. Not without a Levi-Strossian cultural-anthropological emphasis: mythology, symbolic exchange, magical practices, and so on. And against this exotic background, an almost Chaplinian tragicomedy is played out – the father of the family, depressed by the ‘new times’, and the absent-minded son, fascinated by pop music from the radio, a symbol of the interference of modern civilisation. Not so much an ethnographic story as a human story. Straight from G. Fallada – ‘Where to next, little man’… In short, one can judge from the way O. Michi complicates the tasks in the documentary that she is ready to transcend genre boundaries in photography. Conventionally speaking, with her experience, which fits into the space of World Press Photo, she is ready to move into the space of contemporary art. This, as already mentioned, is not an easy transition.

I will try to dwell on a few of its moments.

‘Vulnerable’ (exhibition and album Vulnerable, printed by teNeues publishing house) are dozens of digital photographs divided into three themes: African tribes, peoples of South-East Asia, and inhabitants of Chukotka. The artist describes the tasks he is trying to set: ‘The viewer finds himself in the epicentre of the global problem of choosing between the past and the future, separation and unity, diversity and unification. Vulnerable in this complex situation are not only the minority heroes of the works, but also the viewers of the project, who in one way or another also contribute, albeit not always consciously, to the choice between what to keep and what to sacrifice’. All of this is true, moreover, the viewer is vulnerable, it seems to me, by his own situation: belonging to a more or less well-to-do majority with its purely situational, temporary and optional (literally forced by political correctness and the artist’s efforts) reference to the theme of indigenous peoples.
But what interests me here is not so much this social message as the artistic side itself.
Let’s take just one part – ‘African Diary’: images of ethnic groups in contemporary East Africa. Of course, the ethnographic plan is strong here: as long as the artist has taken up such rare natural material, he cannot ignore the anthropological specifics, the artefacts with which the Mursi, Hamar, Surma, Daasenach, etc. tribes adorn themselves.

Claude Lévi-Strauss considered face painting in indigenous thinking as a process of recreating the hidden, giving social significance, expression of human dignity, mental qualities, etc. All this in O. Michi’s portrait images is available for reading and interpretation.

But let us look at them from the contemporary point of view: in addition to the above-mentioned problems, there is clearly a super-objective here – the actualisation of the relationship between corporeality and artificiality (projectedness, fabrication, etc.). The medial basis is no less interesting. Photography, as a medium since the experiments of the 1920s, has willingly transcended its boundaries, emphasising the subject, the ‘new materiality’. Here there was always a moment of experience, of stagedness. But Michi’s characters naturally weave, say, maize cobs or bunches of berries into their hairstyles, and add various objects to their appearance as attributes: animal bones, some unexpected machine-made objects. As I understand it, all this is the choice of the ‘portrait subjects’ themselves: each of them came to the shoot in the colouring they chose and brought to the shoot the attributes they considered important.

Behind this is a naive hope for contact: the presentation of objects from the alien world, or, on the contrary, prickliness, defence reactions to this intervention – all this can be interpreted. But most importantly, the photomedium naturally incorporates the possibilities of apperception: not only the pictorial, but also the tactile beginning is at work. Moreover, Michi’s ethnographic photography acquires the favoured properties of appropriating elements of an ‘alien’ pictorial language. Thus, in the above-mentioned practice of portraiture with the introduction of flora into the appearance of objects, one can see the images of Arcimboldo, with their interpenetration of the anatomical and floral. And in the woman’s colouring (make-up) with a pantel on a whitewashed background we can feel the psychedelic pea ornament (‘infinity grid’) of Yayoi Kusama.
Digital retouching – Michi’s ‘digital witchcraft’ – is clearly a conscious technique of contemporary art.
The series ‘Vulnerable’ transitional. The exhibition ‘Future Dwelling’ (the collective of GrOM – O. Michi together with art historians Alexey and Artem Loginov) already belongs entirely to the artistic thinking of contemporary art.

…Architectural-futuristic theme is one of the most favourite in Russian art. Since the time of N. Chernyshevsky’s architectural and social utopias, it has embraced ideas of positive, harmonious life-building. There is a powerful tradition here: from the romantic globalist scope of K. Malevich, V. Khlebnikov, N. Ladovsky, VKhUTEMASers to modest but real attempts to create progressive social housing – workers’ towns of the 1920s, etc. In almost every generation, new parameters are introduced into the ideas about the dwelling of the future, and the chronological framework of the future itself changes: from the near future to the distant future.

Let me be clear: the project is not about architecture, it does not seek to compete with the concepts that are constantly arriving in the collective piggy bank of architectural futurology.

The project is a series of large-format (1.8 x 3 metres) digital paintings. The stanza format has a double meaning. It is a reference to classical painting, which implies systematic types of space organisation, with a hint of classical perspective (departures from it and various kinds of failures are immediately readable and have a meaningful character). It also gives the parameters not of any complex architectural formation, but of a typological functional space: something, of course, changes, but the basic parameters of a rectangular volume remain, at least mentally, the width and height of which are constant, but the depth is indefinite, ‘floating’ and requiring visual objectification. By the way, in this simple geometry of ‘entrance’ to space there is also a calculation for the possible introduction of augmented reality – a portal (mechanics, in which the space appears in 360° mode).

In any case, the main idea: filling, adaptation to function, ‘stuffing’ (no capsules, bioforms, other fantasy architectural proposals). Apparently, in this standardisation is the unwillingness to distract from the main theme.

By the way, the function and purpose of the dwelling of the future are also typological. Library, greenhouse, gymnasium, office, some kind of machine hall, even a technological basement. With all the science-fiction contrivances, they are not much different from the traditional ones. There are, of course, also examples when authors let their imagination run wild to a greater extent: for example, a well thought out zoo. Or – a greenhouse in purple bloom. There is even a techno-version of Bosch’s phantasmagoria, played out with the help of robotics. But on the whole, everything is more or less recognisable, closer to the current reality. There are even objects in the subject world of the future that are standard for today. For example, faceless office chairs or rocking chairs for the gym. Why are they ‘taken into the future’? Interpretations are possible, but it seems to me that they are important to the authors as a visual standard. A commonplace one. Because there is another standard – sublime. It is already a benchmark – but not of ordinary life, but of creativity ahead of time, a symbol of ‘will-ness’. Such is Tatlin’s ‘Monument to the III Communist International’, presented in all kinds of projected ‘dwelling’. It is it, according to the authors’ statement, that “mankind will take with it to uncharted territories”. The choice is clear: the Tatlin Tower remains a constant object of adoration and interpretation in contemporary art (Sherry Levine, Dan Flavin, Ai Weiwei, etc.).

Here, too, the authors seem to me to avoid distracting attention with extravagant solutions. I think they deliberately lower the degree of invention. All the more so because the audience, especially young people, whom I believe the project is primarily aimed at, are spoilt by the unrestrained experiments in the sphere of alien reality realised by science fiction cinema. So what is the project devoted to?

Here we can’t do without a brief sketch of a trend in contemporary art, which is usually labelled deadpan photography. The translation ‘impassioned’, ‘unemotional’ is more suitable for the portrait genre: the model is filmed as it is, without attempts to ‘be in character’. The author does not sharpen characterisation, does not force psychologism, and does not include staging. In large-format landscape or urban prints by A. Gursky, L. Balsa, and J. Hazzink, which most often combine traditional and modern technologies – large-format cameras and digital ‘orchestration’ – the meaning of deadpan is expanded. Impassivity has a connotation of objectivity, in the words of Ch. Cotton, author of the famous monograph ‘The Photograph as Contemporary Art’ (Ch. Cotton. ‘The Photograph as Contemporary Art’) – omniscience. The artist creates a kind of visual platform from which reality is perceived epically, with a completeness inaccessible to the individual point of view and point of shooting. This poetics confronted the individualistic and expressive stance of 1980s photography. The viewer, in the context of omniscience, is immersed in a visual reality subject to the discipline of panoramic vision and digitally fabricated from a multitude of individual fragments. Cotton has, in my opinion, created an apt image of this perception, likening it to the position of a conductor who sees the orchestra as a whole and controls the introduction of this or that group (the various components of the visual whole).

The ‘Future Dwelling’ series has deadpan features, both in terms of poetics and technology. It has already been mentioned that the authors avoid distracting (intriguing, frightening) the viewer’s attention with concrete techno-tricks and phantasms. The deadpan impassivity in this case is epicness. Nothing should interfere with apperception (according to dictionaries, ‘the process by which elements of consciousness become clear and distinct’).
Images, even predictive ones, should be taken as a given.
The inauthenticity of images of the dwelling of the future is compelling. It may be different, but in each case it is possible, objective, independent of the moods and expectations of the viewer and the artist. And when it is inhabited by an anthropomorphic cyber crowd – scurrying, flying, flickering. And when it appears as a strange functional space with archaic pipes and unprecedented communications. Well, the dwelling of the future also has its own technological basement.
The ‘stuffing’ of each print is not science-fiction techno, but visuality itself, optics, i.e. navigation in the proposed space. The third dimension plays a special role here. In some paintings, the space of the dwelling is fixed in the background, while in others this plan is mobile, illusory: it is constantly moving away, drawing the eye and consciousness of the viewer.

Ch. Cotton compared the perception of monumental digitalised images (referring to A. Gursky) to conducting. I have my own image of the visuality of this project: a woman examines a ribbon of matter through the light, visually determining the quality, texture, pattern, lack of imperfections, etc. The roll unfolds, there is no end to it. The processuality of perception appears in this project in a similar way: the endless visual fabric stretches without limits.

O. Mandelstam has an image – ‘armed with vision’. I think the purpose of the exhibition ‘Future Dwelling’ is to arm the vision of the audience of contemporary art, especially the youth, with a new experience of vision and visualisation.