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SAULE SULEIMENOVA
SAULE SULEIMENOVA graduated from the Kazakh State Academy of Architecture and Construction in 1996, and was awarded an MFA from the Kazakh National University of Arts in 2013. She has been a member of the Union of Artists of Kazakhstan since 1998. She works with mixed media, creating images and sculptures from plastic bags in a process she describes as ‘waste collage’. Residual Memory, her current project, revisits the traumatic history of Kazakhstan by recycling reproductions of little-known photo documents into collages made of waste. Still painful themes such as the Zheltoksan (the Kazakh youth riots in 1986), and the Asharshylyk (the colonial genocide resulting from Stalin’s Collectivization policies during 1932-1933), give her practice an edge of activism. Awards include: Fellowship of the President of Kazakhstan (1998); Laureate of the Shabyt, Zhiger and Tengri Umai awards; Laureate ‘For creative achievements’ in the №1 Choice of the Year, Kazakhstan, 2017; Shortlisted for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2017; Nominated for the Singapore Art Prize 2017; Nominated to Prince Claus Foundation Art Prize 2016.
Her selected exhibitions include: Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2018); Somewhere in the Great Steppe: Contemporary Art from Kazakhstan, Erarta Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2017-2018); Somewhere in the Great Steppe: Skyline, National Museum of Kazakhstan, Astana (2017). Culture Summit 2017, Abu Dhabi, UAE; Dis/Possessed. A Question of Spirit and Money, Manifesta 10, Folium, Zurich, Switzerland (2016); One Belt One Road, Federation of Women, Sotheby’s, Hong Kong; 56th Venice Biennale in the Why Self project (2015); 5th Moscow Contemporary Art Biennale in the Migrants project of RSGU (2013); ARTBATFEST Almaty Contemporary Art Festival (2013, 2014, 2015); East of Nowhere, Foundation 107, Turin, Italy (2009); Kazakh: Paintings By Saule Suleimenova, Townsend Center, Berkeley University, USA, 2005.
THE THREE BRIDES (2018)
As a result of her Focus Kazakhstan Artist Residency at MOMENTUM, Saule Suleimenova spent two months living and working in Berlin in the Autumn of 2018. Working for the first time in diverse media new to her practice, such as video and a variety of printing practices, Suleimenova explored new ways of working beyond her usual practice of ‘waste collage’. The Three Brides is a silkscreen print, made in the Kunstquartier Bethanien print workshop, based on Sulemeinova’s 2015 work The Three Brides (plastic bags on plastic tablecloth on wooden board), one of five Sulemeinova works featured in MOMENTUM’s exhibition, Bread & Roses: Four Generations of Kazakh Women Artists (2018).
Extrapolating from her usual practice of recreating found and archival images from non-traditional media, like plastic bags and plastic tablecloths, Sulemeinova here revisits her own composition of The Three Brides, in the form of a silkscreen print. The social status of kelin/brides in Kazakh society is the most unprotected. Traditionally, a girl taken into a new family would lose all the privileges of a beloved daughter, only to find herself at the bottom of the social ladder until she gives a birth to a son. The image of the brides itself is based on an archival photograph (1869, from the collection of Prof. Alkey Margulan) depicting three teenagers wearing Kazakh traditional wedding dresses.