“Beauty, though, will save the world,” wrote Dostoyevsky in The Idiot. Generations of artists and writers played out that uniquely Russian glittering idealism: first building revolutionary utopias – Malevich’s and Kandinsky’s abstraction, supposed to herald a new spiritual reality – then turning to “underground” art as an inner emigration, a morally authentic opposition to communist oppression. Seventeen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is anything left of that ecstatic seriousness in Russian art today?

In the untitled video premiering at her first London show, Acquaintances at White Space Gallery, Olga Chernysheva answers that question with a spare, poignant vignette. A woman stands by a metro station compulsively drawing and erasing the same pattern of circle, triangle, square on a cheap plastic sketchpad toy that she is trying to sell to passers-by, before fading into the soft white mist of a Moscow morning. This offer of magical geometry to indifferent city savages is a scene of simple quotidian economic reality, yet it is shot through with art history – the repeated abstract forms of Malevich’s suprematism, a dream of utopia endlessly evoked then denied.