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ALMAGUL MENLIBAYEVA
(b. 1969 in Almaty, Kazakh SSR. Lives and works in Almaty and Berlin)
Almagul Menlibayeva is a video artist, photographer, and curator. Menlibayeva, holds an MFA from the Art and Theatre University of Almaty. Working primarily in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation, Menlibayeva’s practice addresses such critical issues of post-Soviet modernity as: the social, economic, and political transformations in Central Asia; de-colonial re-imaginings of gender; environmental degradation; and Eurasian nomadic and indigenous cosmologies and mythologies. In 2018, she was co-curator, together with David Elliott and Rachel Rits-Volloch, of the groundbreaking exhibition Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists, which took place at MOMENTUM in Berlin’s Kunstquartier Bethanien in partnership with the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
In conjunction with her solo exhibition ‘Transformation’ at the Grand Palais in Paris (France, 2016-17), she was awarded the prestigious Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2017. Among other notable awards, she was the Winner of the Main Prize of the International Film Festival Kino Der Kunst (2013) in Munich, Germany, and shortlisted for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Hong Kong (2020). Previous awards include the ‘Daryn’ State Prize of Kazakhstan (1996), and the ‘Tarlan’ National Award of the Club of Maecenas of Kazakhstan (2003). She was also the Winner of the Grand Prix Asia Art at the II Biennial of Central Asia, in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (1995).
Menlibayeva participated in numerous international Biennales, including: Mardin Biennale, Turkey (2022); Asian Arts Biennale, Taiwan (2021-22); the Asia Pacific Triennale of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (2020, 2012); the Lahore Biennale, Pakistan (2020); Channels Festival, International Biennial of Video Art, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Cairo Biennial, Egypt (2019); the Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea (2018); the Daegu Photo Biennale (2016); the Venice Biennale, Italy (2005, 2007, 2009, 2015); the Moscow Biennale, Russia (2011, 2015); the Kiev Biennial, Ukraine (2013); Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006, 2012); the Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2010); the Mediterranean Biennale, Israel (2010); amongst many others.
Selected recent solo exhibitions include: De. Groen Fine Art Collection, Arnhem, Netherlands (2019); Videoart at Midnight #98: Almagul Menlibayeva, Berlin (2018); Transformation, Grand Palais, Paris, France (2016-2017); Union of Fire and Water, 56th Venice Biennial, Italy (2015); Transoxiana Dreams, Videozone, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2014); An Ode for the Wastelands and Gulags, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria (2013); Daughters of Turan, Casal Solleric, Palma De Mallorca, Spain (2012); LATT: Europe at large #6, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (M HKA), Antwerp, Belgium (2010); among others.
Selected recent group exhibitions include: Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland (2020); Yarat Art Foundation, Baku, Azerbaijan (2020); Kamel Lazaar Foundation (KLF), Tunis, Tunisia (2019); M HKA, Antwerpen, Belgium (2019); Museum of Fine Art, Shymkent, Kazakhstan (2019); RMIT, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Haifa Museum, Israel (2018); Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Germany (2018, 2016); Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2018); Astana State Museum, Kazakhstan (2018, 2016); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium (2017-2020, 2010); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST), Greece (2017); Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2016); National Centre for Contemporary Art ( NCCA), Moscow, Russia (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei, Taiwan (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art Strasbourg, France (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art Arnhem, Netherlands (2014); Singapore Art Stage, Singapore (2014); MoMA PS1, NY, USA (2013); ZKM- Zentrum fur Kunst und Medien Technologie, Karlsruhe, Germany (2012); amongst many others.
TRANSOXANIA DREAMS
2011, HD Video, 23 min
Almagul Menlibayeva’s film tells a tale of ecological devastation in the guise of a mythological narrative staged in the vast landscape of her native Kazakhstan, ravaged by 60 years of Soviet occupation. Transoxania Dreams (2011) is filmed in the brutally changed region of the Aral Sea where its indigenous people live in the Aralkum, the desert of a once thriving region now entirely devoid of water due to radical Soviet irrigation policies. The region of Transoxiana (Greek for ‘across the Oxus’) in southwestern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, once the eastern part of the Hellenistic regime under Alexander the Great and the former homeland of the nomadic tribes of Persia and Turan at the banks of the Oxus River, remained an important trade region along the Northern Silk Road with flourishing civilizations and fertile plains for many centuries. Afflicted by former Soviet policies and abandoned by commercial and cultural interests, today, Transoxania lies bare and stripped in a surreal state of existence with discarded fishing fleets on dusty terrain, ravaged by metal scavengers while its inhabitants look on as the sea keeps receding into a far and unreachable distance of a seemingly better world. Menlibayeva tells the tale of a young fisherman’s daughter who observes the dramatic changes to the landscape of the Aral region and its population through a child’s eyes in a dreamlike mélange of documentary and fantasy. Menlibayeva visually walks the viewer through a vacant landscape and a symbolic dream whereby the girl’s father searches for the remaining sea and new fishing grounds while encountering strange and seductive four-legged female creatures (Centaurs) on his way through the hostile desert. Drawing on the image of the Greek mythological figure of the Centaur, Menlibayeva creates alluring hybrid beings, both sexually charged and bizarre. According to the legend, when the ancient Greeks first encountered the nomads of the Transoxianian Steppes on their horses, they initially believed them to be mythological quadrupeds, part person part animal, fearing their savage and magical powers. In Transoxania Dreams, Menlibayeva, a pictorial sorceress herself, breeds an eccentric storyline and fantastical imagery extracted from her own atavistic repertoire; leading us visually through an existing, yet unimaginable, landscape in a distant and hypnagogic world.
ALTAR OF THE EAST
1. Tokamak (2016/18), photograph on aludibond, 150 cm X 100 cm (pictured left)
2. Altar of the East (2016/18), photograph on aludibond, 100 cm X 150 cm (pictured middle)
3. The Constructor (2016/18), photograph on aludibond, 150 cm X 100 cm (pictured right)
Tokamak (depicted above on the left) depicts the KTM Tokamak, the experimental materials-testing thermonuclear fusion reactor that started operation at the National Nuclear Center in Kurchatov, Kazakhstan in June 2017. As well as being a celebration of the triumph of new technology, this work also evokes memories of the nuclear arms race during the Cold War, in particular Kurchatov’s central role in the Soviet-era nuclear weapons tests. It is seen here alongside post-independence Kazakhstan’s ambitious plans for the development of nuclear power.
The image Altar of the East (in the center), depicts the Soviet-era control panel in Kurchatov for detonating nuclear weapons. The iconic ‘Button’ of Cold War dread is pictured in this triptych of images as a relic of a past era giving way to a future of science and technology where women play the central roles, as depicted in The Constructor (on the right), a photo-collage superimposing a woman’s face onto images of the construction of Kazakhstan’s new capital Astana.
This tryptich was shown in 2018 in Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists, an exhibition organized by MOMENTUM in partnership with the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan. This show comprises work in a wide-range of media by 20 artists created from 1945 to the present. Emerging Kazakh women artists are prefaced in the show by a group of eminent forerunners who have remained more or less invisible within the history of Soviet, Kazakh and world art. Against the tumult of Stalinist repression and its aftermath, the work of these women has forged a bridge between traditional Kazakh arts, crafts and ways of living, the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s and ‘30s, socialist realism and a completely new approach to art making that emerged from the beginning of the 1980s. The works that these great grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers, and daughters of contemporary Kazakh art have produced reflect the melting-pot of ideas and influences between east and west arising from Kazakhstan’s history of tumultuous political and social change. Bread & Roses took place in parallel to the Focus Kazakhstan Artist Residency Exhibition at the MOMENTUM Gallery, also in the Kunstquartier Bethanien.