"Olga Kundina’s paintings mark Tel Aviv’s African territory: their titles bear the names of Tel Aviv streets (e.g. Hachmei Israel, 2015) or neighborhoods (e.g. Shapira, 2015), or portray the community’s central institutions—a hairdresser on Salameh Road (Hairdressing Salon, 2015) or The Men’s Club on Nave Shaanan, 2015). The figures are usually depicted from afar, without facial features: the women at the hairdresser’s are hidden behind the display window and red script in Amharic, the men are swallowed into the café, among television screens. Each painting has its own subject, but the emphasis on formalist values constantly redefines the power of the painting, and its dilemma: to narrate a tale or to be a painting. In Shapira, the two men carrying a red mattress against a murky white background create an odd, almost surreal scene, which extends the visible to the edge of coherence.  The red forms in Hairdressing Salon have a life of their own, and they alternately cut off from and return to the representations that incarcerate them—again becoming a display window and letters in a foreign language. Thus, the more the painting is attentive to its inner issues, so the African figures take on a double role: the protagonists of the routine life of an immigrant in Tel Aviv, as well as the protagonists of the painting’s drama." - Ruti Direktor, Curator of Tel Aviv Museum of Art