Seven Deadly Desires

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.