Born 1984 in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Astana, Kazakhstan

Anar Aubakir’s paintings, often shown in complex installations, emanate a disquieting poetic symbolism that, while referring to stories and relationships she has encountered in Kazakhstan, suggest a much broader reference. She completed an MA at the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in Almaty; in 2010 she won the best realist painting award in the Russian Art Week competition in St. Petersburg as well as the 1st painting prize in the Week of Kazakhstan Art competition in Almaty. Her work was awarded the Cholpan-Ata City Award in Kyrgyzstan in 2016. She is also the organizer of the first traveling exhibitions to have taken place since Kazakhstan became independent. From 2013 to 2017, she organized more than a dozen exhibitions, in which over 20 artists participated, which have travelled to Pavlodar, Semey, Aktobe, Atyrau, Kostanay, Karaganda, Temirtau, Kokshetau, Petropavlovsk, Ust-Kamenogorsk, Aktau and Astana. In each of the cities she conducted master classes in painting and interdisciplinary art. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held in Almaty (2010) and Astana (2015.) Her works are in museum collections in Kazakhstan and Tatarstan.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

 
Anar Aubakir, Home (2009-2018), installation: oil on canvas, charcoal, inkjet print on paper, wood
 

In 1976 my parents bought a house in Pavlodar in the north of Kazakhstan. Following family tradition, my mother and father, both being the oldest children, were responsible to their parents for their younger brothers and sisters. Our house became a common home for close relatives, as well as for distant relations who came to the city from nearby collective and state farms – and even for close family friends.

In 2009 Marina and her son Timur appeared in our family. I often asked her and her son to pose for me as I could see that their interesting faces harboured uneasy stories. Marina frequently spoke about her happy previous life in Kabardino-Balkaria [in the north Caucasus] and planned to go back there as soon as possible.

Marina first came to Kazakhstan in the spring of 1944, when the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR decided to deport Balkars, of which she is one, from their homeland. An earlier famine had killed a large number of indigenous Kazakhs, and it was decided to recolonize these territories by people from other nationalities.

Marina and her family found themselves in the Sherbaktinsky district of the Pavlodar region. Many who had been deported returned to their homeland after Stalin’s death, but the story of Marina and Timur was different. In 2010 Marina decided to take her son ‘home’, hoping that according to the traditions of her people, older relatives would help her son arrange his life. She sold all her belongings in the village and came to Pavlodar, where her son was working. Beside a friend of her mother, she knew no one and she settled in the house next to us. Timur had been born and raised in Kazakhstan and it was difficult for him to imagine living in another place, but Marina could not stay in a strange house for a long time – at one point she even lived in her son’s car. Then my parents invited her to our house. Marina’s plan collapsed when her son had a serious traffic accident and a criminal case was brought against him. This trial lasted over a year. During this time Marina lived in our house with her son. But her desire to leave became almost overwhelming. Step by step, Marina managed to remove all charges against her son. Finally she bought train tickets and they went to the station, but on the platform she had a heart attack. In the ambulance she died. Timur buried his mother in Pavlodar and stayed in Kazakhstan. Marina’s mother refused to participate in her funeral; her daughter’s plan for a joyful reunion with her family and new life in her home of Kabardino-Balkaria remained only a dream.

Home includes paintings and other works that express the preservation of nomadic spiritual and moral values in the face of the ruinous heritage left by the Soviet Union. Even when exhausted by the systematic ethnocide in the 20th century, my native Kazakh people have managed to maintain their sense of humanity by opening their arms to many others who have been deprived of means of subsistence during their time of forced deportation.

In Home I have composed a composite portrait of a traditional Kazakh family – one which always had a place for people in need. By doing this, I raise the question of whether the Kazakh people will succeed in transferring such high standards to future generations.

(1948-1996) Born in Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSR. Lived and worked in Almaty.

Lidya Blinova’s parents both worked as architects, her grandfather was a priest and mystic. She graduated from the Architecture and Construction Institute in Almaty and her subsequent work encompassed architecture, art, poetry, sculpture, jewelry, book design, acting, and cinema. By inclination she was a radical. She jointly developed ideas with Rustam Khalfin, her partner, (who described her as his ‘Alter Ego’) whom she had first met in 1962, at the age of fourteen, in the graphic studio of Alma-Ata’s Palace of Pioneers. Khalfin’s idea of the pulota – a keyhole into a fragmented world of space, time, and image – originated with Blinova. Formed by the simple gesture of folding a fist and looking through the hole in its middle, it created what she described as the ‘ultimate plastic object,’ replete, at the same time, with fullness and emptiness.

At the end of the 1960s, Blinova’s earliest work was wooden sculpture made in the studio of Isaak Itkind, a primitivist and friend of Mark Chagall who had been imprisoned in Kazakhstan. She also encountered Pavel Zaltsman, a close associate of avant-garde painter Pavel Filonov in Leningrad, who had been interned in Karlag and, after his release in the mid-1950s, worked as an artist, art teacher and designer in the film industry. From the 1970s, she both organized and was a participant in non-official art exhibitions held in private apartments in Almaty that showed autonomous works by pupils of Vladimir Sterligov. (See also bio of Tatiana Glebova.)

Both Blinova and Khalfin refused to work in any official capacity in order to concentrate on their own different forms of creative activity; Blinova often supported herself by producing and selling small sculptural forms as jewelry. In 1986, she worked as Production Designer on director Sergei Bodrov’s first film The Non-Professionals and, the following year, as costume designer for Sergei Solovyov’s film The Stray, White and The Speckled (1985). She also made puppet shows for children. Bringing together many different strands of interest that included shamanism, linguistics, structuralism, psychology and tantrism, she encouraged a conceptual approach in both her own work and that of her friends while also being aware of the emotional and sensual imperative of art.

In 1995 she designed a series of catalogues on contemporary Kazakh artists for the Soros Foundation in Almaty, made Finger Ornaments, her conceptual photo-series of different mudras, and presented her installation Poem for a Cat at the Kokserek Gallery which also published the text of the work.

In 2011 her work was posthumously represented in the exhibition Between the Past and the Future: Minus 20. The Archeology of Relevance at the Kasteyev Art Museum in Almaty.

LIDYA BLINOVA (1948-1996)
 

Lidya Blinova, Untitled Sculpture [Self Portrait] (1966-69)

wood, 85x70x70cm

Courtesy of the Said Dzhienbayev Collection
 

Lidya Blinova, Finger Ornaments (1995)

series of 10 photographs, B/W, PVC backing, 29x201cm

Courtesy of the artist’s estate
 

Lidya Blinova, Poetry for Cats (1995)

installation: text on paper, size variable

Courtesy of the artist’s estate
 

Lidya Blinova, Lidya Blinova: Pulota (2018)

video, single-channel, HD, sound, 17’,16:9. Directed by Saule Suleimenova (b. 1970)

Courtesy of the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana, and Ruhani Zhangyru
 

 
LIDYA BLINOVA: Poetry for Cats (1995)
 
The Learned Pussycat

Prologue

The wind whipped the atmosphere.
Clouds coursed without fear.
The moon in its seething frills
Ascended over the hills.
The earth poured towards it:
Villages, fields, and hamlets.
A dark forest nodded from vast plains
To heaven’s chatelaine.

And everything sublunar under the moon
Rose higher and aloft:
The waves and the land,
A cat on a roof and its thoughts,
And, deep below the waves, the sand.

After buzzing out the day like combs,
The ancient city slumbered: the moon’s
Mead trickled towards the mountain’s foot.
Parades, promenades, and fêtes
Raged here a century ago,
But now the ruins slept in rows.

The overgrown gardens were bothered
Only by the water’s patter.
The stream’s angelic tone
Resounded where the water’s flow
Was dammed by fallen leaves.
What emptiness and peace!

But what did we see?
In a window a candle was burning,
And the candle revealed
A pussycat purring.

A tizzy swept over the old garden.
Doors were slammed, footsteps cascaded.
And, quite as black as a roach,
Into the light’s triangle crept a coach.

1.

The learned pussycat, dismayed and aggrieved,
Leapt into the carriage, shouting “To the sea!”
A dog dolefully howled in the park.
A sinister coachman emerged from the dark,
An amulet glinting and melting under his cape.
The moon went pale, giving chase.
Raving, the steeds thundered, frothing at the mouth.
The uneven pursuit made the moon catch its breath.
Over rooftops, twixt chimneys, through poplar fleece,
It rushed to the place beyond the fields
Where the sea stood like a living wall.

And the pussycat in the coach?
She was crazed, she was ill.
What thought could she give to the coachman?
What matter to her was the moon’s will?

For every piece of iron in the womblike contraption
The patter of hooves smashed into fractions.
The pussycat imagined that, through flint and dirt,
Alongside her, Achilles roared, and the turtle crept.

Oh, the running in place, the maundering
Of things moving motionlessly toward their mark!

2.

Oh, the trellised mirrors of old aporias!
And the sea came ever closer, the cherished sea!
Every jolt and pothole on the highway
Sent the pussycat higher into the sky,
As if yeast were stirred into things at creation
By someone quite batty about expansion.

3.

Madness’s abyss beckoned to the pussycat.
Panting, the moon whispered, “Drat!
All we needed was for the pussycat to flip!”
It was so angry it slipped,
And, suddenly, it dropped into the coach
Out of the empyrean like ice hurtling off a roof.

The straps and traces were lost in a blink,
The horses speeding off down the stony brink.
The driver melted into thin air,
And his passengers missed dying by a hair,
As his chariot fell to pieces.
The pussycat and the moon sat on the beach.

4.

It is a pity their important chat
Has come down to us in bits and scraps.
“There is a gazillion . . .
Issues of logic.”
“But there is a gamut.”
“Then what is it?
Philosophizing like Hamlet?
No, Buridan . . .”
“I’ve been harping on that for ages.
We’re again walking on bodies . . .”
“The unthinkable . . .” “ . . . cat sausage
turned into the coveted puss in booties.”
“Uniqueness seduces you.”
“And what is your métier?”
“Everyone needs a milieu:
Water is my cup of tea.”

5.

Then the breeze blew in our direction,
Making audible their conversation.

“Listen, I’ve seen your face before.
I remember: it was on the roof next door.
You often peered through the dusty lunette
Into chambers I no longer rent.

“With a gaze now joyful, now sad, you kept watch
Over all the ups and downs in the masterwork
That consumed me then from paws to ears.
But it seems as if years,
No, as if centuries have passed since that time,
And suddenly I peer so closely into your eyes.
Oh, what happened? Where we were rushing?
We are mixed up in a terrible muddle!”

“Take courage, take courage, you have friends,
And I dare to rank myself among them.
Let it be known that for a long time
A gilded palace to you has been assigned.
The best pencils have been carefully whetted,
Shelves stacked with books, and lantern lighted.
And out the window what expanses you shall see.”
The pussycat cried, “Where is it? Who did this for me?”

Then the moon, which burned like copper,
Ebbed and faded with a mutter.
It waned so fast, in a thrice,
Its shape resembled a melon slice.
Masts and rigging went up in a jig.
What was left of the thing—
A barely visible ashy oblong—
Burrowed into storm clouds and was gone.
Everyone was forced to feign
It was the face of the moon.

6.

The moon summoned a wave to its side.
The wave lifted the moon up high.
And so between heaven and earth
The little ship hung in mid-air,
As on a tinted postal card.
Grabbing her things from the strand,
The pussycat boarded the bark,
Whispering “Adieu” to the sixth part.

7.

Wisps of phosphoric foam sputtered.
Selene’s new horns glittered,
And with his burning saucers Argus scowled
At the enraptured striped pussycat’s tail.
The first opera’s chimera was born in the pussycat.
There was applause in the stalls, noises in the pit.
The storm clouds rose, opening an entrance
In which the sea sighed like an audience.
Her body filled with an invisible force,
The universe subsided, and the pussycat held forth.
Song’s primordial magical vigor
Reawakened in the fish their ardor.
The starry sky got goosebumps,
And the bowels of the earth rumbled.
…………………………………………..
…………………………………………..

8.

By morning, the sea tour was over.
The elements were entrusted with new roles.
The one who came for the cat in the darkness
Had to go looking for the overheated horses.

9.

The tide rolled out, and towards the sea
The grass bent sadly in the estuary.
In the fog, the sandbanks and islands
Altered their outlines.

And then a prickly eyelid opened a bit
Over a gloomy ridge of distant foothills.
Here man and stone conspired ever harder,
Establishing their power over the water.
Battlements and bends were sharper than the shore,
And the sand gave way to the granite.
Farther down, the fog hardened into boulders.
Like crystals, the light they beamed cut.

The golden bark hastened to take
Сover in a tangle of dark channels.
And the passenger? She dreamt of taking
A bath and setting foot on dry land.

10.

…………………………………………
…………………………………………
………………………………………….
…………………………………………

…………………………………………
…………………………………………
…………………………………………
…………………………………………
…………………………………………
…………………………………………
…………………………………………
……………………………………. But

The incident was settled with sanity
By the guard, who saluted the cat,
And the porter, who grabbed her tote,
sac de voyage, and the case with her vanity.

The heavy door cut off, like a tail,
The mutters and shouts of the crowd,
The stone bridge, ready to fail,
And the sinister hugger-mugger of the town.

She climbed a steep cascade,
Then walked down the hall to her rooms.
If you such a voyage had made
You’d be glad of an old cozy home.

The End

The Warlock

For a hundred coins and a bottle of hooch
He bought an old lighthouse and an island to boot.
And the sturdy bricks he found
He purchased for a pound.
He hired a longboat and hauled manure
To fertilize the tuberose and cucumber.
And he turned in the space of a year
The lighthouse into heaven on earth.

There were twelve rooms, besides the boudoir,
As you ascended the spiral stairs.
To the ground floor he bequeathed
An oval room with an inglenook hearth.
He could not explain why, but on the roof
He built a cozy little loft.
On three of its walls he depicted
The moon’s ephemeris.

What of it? The old ennui
Found him there, too, tormenting him.
He again sprinkled, lost in reverie,
Fistfuls of sand from the cliff.
Hiding upstairs,
He again groaned in agony.
He again confided in verse
While neglecting his weeding.

And in the oracle of ancient days,
In the stars and their trails,
He kept on glimpsing the innocent gaze,
The eyeglasses, and the tail.

– Lidya Blinova
Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan (early 1990s)
Trans. from the Russian by Thomas Campbell (2018)

Born 1985 in Aktobe, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Astana, Kazakhstan.

Bakhyt Bubikanova graduated from the painting and sculpture department of the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in Almaty in 2008. With a mixed-media practice encompassing video, performance, photography, drawing, painting, collage, and installation, she has been actively exhibiting her work since 2005. Since 2010, she has been teaching in the Kasteyev School of Fine Arts and Design. In 2014, she was given the First President’s Award for merits in the field of Kazakh contemporary art. Her selected solo exhibitions include: Homo, Almaty (2010); The Казахелiанский Superethnos, Atmosphere Art Space, Almaty (2014). Recent group exhibitions include: The Nomads, Artwin Gallery, Moscow, Russia (2015); Shymkent Art Days, Shymkent, Kazakhstan (2016); Elsewhere, Floodlight Foundation, London (2017); Suns and Neons above Kazakhstan, Yarat Contemporary Art Center, Baku, Azerbaijan (2017); Painting Resistance, Aspan Gallery, Almaty (2017); Postcolonial Art of Asia, GEDOK Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe Germany (2018); Art Dubai, UAE (2018). Intrenational Biennales include: A Time for Dreams, the Fourth International Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Moscow (2014).

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Bakhyt Bubikanova, Sebastian (2013), video, 2’5”

This is the story about the life of Saint Sebastian, who was bound and pierced with arrows for his faith – but remained alive.

In the current situation, any public political statement, one that often includes the artist’s body, is akin to the history of Sebastian.

It is doubtful whether anyone will shoot you with arrows nowadays, but artists still have to punish themselves to prove and declare what they believe.

And so this work is more like a biography of an ordinary person who harnesses themselves and waits.

Bakhyt Bubikanova, New Year’s Post Cards (2014), series of 5 photomontages

I started my search in contemporary art from working on postcards using collage. These 2015 New Year’s cards (in the Chinese calendar this was the Year of the “Goat”) was made as a proposal for distribution via the internet.

The format of collage is very suitable for our country, as it reflects how we collect fragmentary information: classical Roman columns with curtains; girls and boys who base their style of dress and behaviour on what they see on the internet and TV; a traditional Kazakh feast on a Soviet New Year’s Eve, (with the Red Star of the USSR instead of the star of Bethlehem); rituals of blessing (Bata) and the cult of sacrifice with bowls of meat and qazi (sausage-like food): an eclecticism of styles and symbols that, at the same time represents, one unique picture of identity: Eurasian collaboration.

Bakhyt Bubikanova, Boztorgay (2018), video, 6’10”

In the video I sit on a decorative hill, against the backdrop of pyramids. I am listening to music, crying out in time with the melody of the hit song ‘Boztorgay’, written by Kenen Azirbayev and performed by Meirambek Bespaev, that became popular in the ‘90s.

In my childhood, I heard it many times on a cassette tape recorder at home. It was my father’s favorite song and tells the sad story of an orphan.

For me this song is a symbol of the Kazakh country. The modern culture of Kazakhstan is riven through with tragedies: wars, famine, repressions. We can observe this in the colour of our paintings, in our music, theatre and cinema, even in our tradition of zhoktau (song lamentations).
Although all Kazakhs have experienced tragedies, they have still not lost hope and retain an element of humour.

Ganiya Chagatayeva

Born 1956 in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan

Ganiya Chagatayeva graduated from the department of Graphic Design in the Moscow Art and Industry Academy (former Stroganov Academy) and taught at the Zhurgenov Kazakh National Academy of Arts. She participated in the seminars of Vyacheslav Koleichuk, a post-constructivist sound and kinetic artist and Aleksandr Lavrentiev, a designer and grandson of Aleksander Rodchenko, which were held with the assistance of VNIUE Moscow (Moscow Technological University). She is a member of the Union of Artists and the Union of Designers. Chagatayeva works at the junction of painting and graphics, also making objects and installations, and teaching.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Eastern wisdom says: Our world is a stream of metaphors and symbols in a pattern. Behind the boundaries of the visible world lies a clear divine order. In nature, everything is structured and subordinated to one’s own laws of harmony and rhythm. The laws of rhythm are the breath of the universe, resonating through art. The rhythmic formation of the inner environment of human perception is the desire to look beyond the visible. I search for my own understanding in the world and for a universal beginning that may be found in pre-figurative states. This is a conceptual experiment in the style of abstract expressionism. Overcoming the plane of the horizon, by opening inner perspective, and reflecting on the laws of harmony and rhythm, the highest order may be found hidden in the crystallization of symbolic thinking behind the visible chaos of nature. This makes it possible to create new spatial rhythms and images by finding new forms.

Ganiya Chagatayeva, House (2005), video performance, 4’40”
Commissioned by Shaarbek Amankul, Art Connection, Kyrgyzstan

Ganiya Chagatayeva, Transforming Object, Bird I-III (2005), series of 3 photographs

The southern shore resembled an almost uninhabited island, above which stood the dilapidated remains of a military facility. The building – a monster, like a vampire, dug into the body of Lake Issyk-Kul [in Kyrgyzstan]. The squares of the concrete beams divided the room into blocks and pools. Like blood vessels, huge rusty pipes intertwined the space. On the walls hung “stalactites” from bird dung and on the floor – fallen off plaster similar to an egg shell. In the huge openings of the windows the watery surface of Issyk-Kul pulsated like blue satin splinters.

In an uninhabited, abandoned room – a tied dog … Such a sight looked as absurd as the empty pools on the shore of the lake. Subsequently, I included this dog in the credits of the film under the name “Stalker”. Throughout the whole area there was amazingly sparse vegetation and only the poisonous ephedra bush splendidly dissolved in its bright red berries. Near the building grew a curved, dried out tree, I gave it a new name – “Ephedrevo” and decorated it with green leaves from the ephedra.

A dried tree, a black dog, cellars, catacombs, labyrinths…

On the second floor, there was a ledge inside a room, possibly the remains of a balcony. At this point I started to make my first huge “Nest” object. It symbolized the “heart” of the building, it animated the space, and returned life to it.

All the coast was neatly furnished with large porous rocks. They had smooth curved forms, and like sculptures they rose against a background of bright, small stones.

The idea behind the video-performance was – to paraphrase a common metaphor – turning a pupa into a butterfly. In the film, the action had to move in the reverse order – the butterfly’s transition to the pupa-cocoon, and then from the cocoon-net to the likeness of a worm.

The trapper hunts for the Bird – his double, which lives in the heart of the destroyed building. Bird tracks are lost in the sky, returning as a cloud. The sculptural basis of the action is the square (the bird) and the circle that limits it (the net). A catcher with a net can follow the bird to the shore, looking for it inside the building. In an act of transformation, the bird disappears among the coastal rocks.

The net symbolizes a cocoon, stasis, a cage, our ego. Having been caught in the cocoon-net, the Bird tears it up, as the image of a pathetic, helpless creature, creeping out like a worm.

The idea of the duality of consciousness is expressed in the images of the Hunter and the Bird in one person. The artist Vyacheslav Akhunov, afterwards, beautifully depicted his moment of birth from the cocoon-net.

“Nest”, “Ephedrevo”, “The Fallen Cloud”, “Footprints”, photographs – my independent art objects entered the video performance and merged into the drama of the film.

The sunny days seemed to have been ordered for our symposium and ended with this ‘graduation work’.

The house saw us off with empty blue eye sockets, then the berries of the “Ephedrevo” dropped. Inside the house, in a large nest, the dog “Stalker” slept.

– Ganiya Chagatayeva

Natalya Dyu

Born 1976 in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan

Natalya Dyu studied Fine Arts at the Buketov Karaganda State University, in the faculty of mechanical drawing. Selected exhibitions include: BALAGAN!!! Contemporary art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2015); Between Heaven and Earth. Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia, Calvert 22, London (2011); East of Nowhere. Contemporary Art from Post-Soviet Central Asia, Fondazione 107, Turin, Italy (2009). International Biennales include: the 2nd International Antakya Biennial, Antakya, Turkey (2010); Qui Vive?, 2nd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia (2010); What Keeps Mankind Alive?, 11th International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2009); So Close Yet So Far Away, 2nd International Incheon Women Artists’ Biennale, Incheon Art Platform, Korean-Chinese Cultural Center Gallery, Korea (2009); M’ARTIAN FIELDS: Collaboration, curated by Irina Yashkova, 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, M’ARS Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow, Russia (2009); Muzikstan, Central Asian Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2008).

Natalya Dyu,I Love Naomi and Naomi Loves Fruits (2001), video, 4’27”

In I Love Naomi and Naomi Loves Fruits (2001) the artist is filmed in pink pyjamas sitting on the toilet, a place to dream, where she obsessively soliloquizes a fantasy about her life and that of the supermodel, Naomi Campbell. Her comparative daydream both highlights and temporarily obliterates what is an unbridgeable void between the aspirations of neo-liberal consumerism and reality.

Natalya Dyu, So Naive, So Fluffy… (2009), video, 4’54”

In So Naïve, So Fluffy (2009), the artist plays the part of a young girl dreaming on her bed, writing out names and words onto labels that she then sticks onto the backs of a flock of small chickens that chaotically and noisily run through her bedroom. The labels fall off, creating unreadable messages on her bedsheet, punctuated by the shit of the birds.

Vera Ermolaeva

(1893-1937) Born in Petrovsk, Russian Empire. Murdered in Dolinka Camp, KARLAG, Karaganda, Kazakh SSR.

Artist, designer, and illustrator Vera Ermolaeva came from a wealthy, noble family and, at the age of 10, was crippled by a fall from a horse; from this time she could walk only with crutches. She went to different schools in Paris, Lausanne and St Petersburg, graduating from the Princess A.A. Oblenskaya Academy in 1910. From 1911 to 1914, she studied at the private art school of painter Mikhail Bernstein, travelled to Paris and began to move in advanced Cubo-Futurist circles in Petrograd. In 1916, she became a member of Bezkrovnoe ubiitsvo (‘Bloodless Murder’), a group of futurist artists, and designed the sets and costumes for Ilya Zdanevich’s play Yanko 1. She also became interested in icons, folk art, broadsheets (lubki) and painted shop signs, amassing a large collection of the latter that she donated to the Petrograd City Museum where, for a time, she worked. In 1917 she joined the artists’ collectives Svoboda iskusstvu (‘Freedom for Art’) and Iskusstvo i Revoliutsia (‘Art and Revolution’) and met the writers Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1918 she became a founder member of the Segodnya (‘Today’) publication house and began to illustrate books, including three works by Natan Vengrov and ‘Pioneers’, a Russian translation of a poem by Walt Whitman.

In 1919 she was sent to Vitebsk to work as a teacher in the People’s Art School, which Mark Chagall had founded and invited Kazimir Malevich to teach there. His flat, abstract style of Suprematism strongly influenced Ermolaeva’s work and took over the school, creating a rift between his approach and that of Chagall. In 1920 she made set designs for the opera Pobeda nad solntsem (‘Victory over the Sun’ 1913), by Mikhail Matyushin and Aleksei Kruchenykh for which Malevich had made the original designs – particularly the ‘Black Square’ backdrop – that later he claimed to be the origin of Suprematism. Together with Malevich and his students, she formed UNOVIS (The Creators of the New Art) – a research laboratory for studying the development of art, colour, spirituality and artistic form in the revolutionary climate of the Soviet Union in the early 1920s.

Following her return to Petrograd/Leningrad in 1923, she directed the Colour Laboratory in GINKhUK (the State Institute of Artistic Culture) of which Malevich was both the General Director and Head of the Department of Painting Culture. GINKhUK was closed by the State in 1926, after it had been criticised in the Press for being ‘a State-supported monastery’ and Malevich had been arrested and interrogated for three months.

During the late 1920s Ermolaeva also closely associated with the Oberiuty (The Association for Real Art), a group of advanced writers and performance artists, including Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky, both later suppressed, with whom she collaborated by illustrating their books. From 1925, working with the DetGIz (the Children’s Division of the State Publishing House), where she met Tatiana Glebova [see below], she explored new ideas and formats for children’s books. In 1929, with former members of UNOVIS, she formed a new group that elaborated Malevich’s synthesis of abstraction and realism in the light of the dramatic changes that were then taking place throughout the country during the First Five Year Plan. Desolation in the countryside was a recurrent theme and, in her illustrations for Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Goethe’s Reynard the Fox, she shifted her focus towards books for adults.

VERA ERMOLAEVA
 
The Fables of Ivan Krylov, The Liar, a children’s book illustrated by Vera Ermolaeva, 2nd edition. Moscow-Leningrad, OGIZ-Young Guard, 1931. 12 pp. Edition: 50,000
Courtesy of the Karaganda Regional Museum of Fine Arts, Karaganda, Kazakhstan
 
VERA: The Life and Death of Vera Ermolaeva (2018)
single-channel HD video, sound, 11’, 16:9. Directed by Almagul Menlibayeva (b. 1969)
Courtesy of the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana, and Ruhani Zhangyru

Zoya Falkova

Born 1982 in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Zoya Falkova graduated with a Masters degree in Architecture from the School of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Almaty, in 2004. She has participated in many contemporary art exhibitions and festivals in the former Soviet Union and Europe, including the unofficial pavilion of Kazakhstan at the 57th Biennale of Venice (2017). Also in 2017, she was nominated for the Singapore Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Art Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include: PLAYINGTHEWOMAN, Esentai Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan (2017); Disappearing Peninsula/Southern Siberia, Kyiv, Ukraine (2018). Falkova’s area of interest is the study and deconstruction of colonial and post-colonial practices, both gendered, political, and ecological. She works in installation, sculpture, media art, photography, painting, and drawing, and also creates poetic texts.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Zoya Falkova, EVERMUST (2017), object: artificial leather, filler, chain

‘The punching bag in the form of a woman’s torso is both a female portrait and the expression of a social climate in which violence is not only considered the norm but may even be a sign of love.’

– Zoya Falkova

Aisha Galimbaeva

(1917–2008): Born in the Kazakh SSR. Lived and worked in Kazakhstan.

Aisha Galimbaeva is one of the most important pioneers of women’s art in Kazakhstan. She was a Laureate of the State Prize of the Kazakh SSR (1972) and was also awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and the Order of the Badge of Honour. A painter, production designer for film and theatre, and educator, she is noted for her colourful and realistic depictions of the changing social and psychological position of women in Kazakhstan during the mid-20th century.

By the age of 17, she had received a diploma from the N.V. Gogol Art College in Almaty; she graduated from the Alma-Ata Art College in 1943 and worked at the Аll-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow and the MosFilm Studios that, from 1941 to 1943, was evacuated to Alma-Ata as a result of the war, where film director Sergei Eisenstein directed the first part of his epic Ivan The Terrible.

After the war, she became a professor at the Alma-Ata Art institute and the Graphics and Art department of the Kazakh Abai State Pedagogical Institute. In the 1950s she was a designer on The Daughter of the Steppes (1954), A Poem About Love (1954) and other films, working closely with Pavel Zaltsman, an avant-garde artist who was an associate of Pavel Filonov, one of the charismatic leaders of the Leningrad art scene.

In her paintings, costume and set designs, she recuperated and made popular again traditional dress, decorations and modes of life that had virtually disappeared. Although she worked in the official genre of socialist realism, when she painted factories, the landscape or collective farms in the countryside, it was through a Kazakh rather than Soviet prism. Two of her portraits of farm brigade leaders from the 1980s shown in this exhibition combine the almost disappearing official style with an unbridled modernist romanticism. From 1951 she was a member of the Artists’ Union of Kazakhstan, USSR. She died in Almaty in 2008.

AISHA GALIMBAEVA (1917 – 2008)
 
Aisha Galimbaeva, National Talents (1957)
oil on canvas, 100х130cm
Courtesy of the Kasteyev State Museum, Almaty, Kazakhstan
 

Aisha Galimbaeva, Portrait of Work Brigade Leader, M. Abenova (1984)
oil on canvas, 70х86cm
Courtesy of the Karaganda Regional Museum of Fine Arts, Karaganda, Kazakhstan
 

Aisha Galimbaeva, Portrait of the Leader of the Shepherds’ Brigade in the Ulguli State Collective Farm (Sovkhoz), Zhanalyksky district, Kazina (1985)
oil on canvas, 160x170cm
Courtesy of the Karaganda Regional Museum of Fine Arts, Karaganda, Kazakhstan
 

AISHA: The Works of Aisha Galimbaeva (2018)
single-channel HD video, sound, 22’,16:9
Directed by Almagul Menlibayeva (b. 1969)
This video contains extracts edited from the following films on which Galimbaeva worked as a designer with Pavel Zaltsman: Poem about Love (1954), directed by Sh. Aymanov, K. Gakkel, Alma-Ata Film Studio, 6’:40” (from original length 1:26). The film is based on ‘Kozy Korpesh – Bayan Sulu’ – a Kazakh lyric-epic poem of the XIII-XIV century. Lady Dzhigit (1955), directed by P. Bogolyubov, Alma-Ata Film Studio, 6’.40” (from original length 1:32). This thwarted love story, set on a Collective Farm, illustrates in a comic way traditional Kazakh horse-based courting customs. The lovers are eventually brought together with great happiness and rejoicing. The Daughter of the Steppes (1954), directed by Sh. Aymanov, K. Gakkel, Alma-Ata Film Studio. This partisan melodrama set between the first years of Soviet power and World War II tells the story of an orphan girl who studies herbal medicine and uses this to cure soldiers on the front. She becomes a successful university lecturer.

Courtesy of the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana, Ruhani Zhangyru, and Kazakhfilm
 

Film poster for The Daughter of the Steppes (1954), designer unknown
Reprinted in Berlin, 2018 by Almagul Menlibayeva and Leslie Ranzoni

Tatiana Glebova

(1900-1985): Born in St. Petersburg, Russian Empire. Lived and worked in St. Petersburg and Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan.

Tatiana Glebova was born into a radical intellectual family in St. Petersburg where her grandfather, Count Fyodor Tolstoy, was vice-president of the Art Academy. She attended this school from 1924 to 1927, initially in the studio of Alexander Savinov, but, from 1925, studied with the established avant-garde painter Pavel Filonov, who ran a workshop within the academy. The Leningrad avant-garde at this time was dominated by two artistic factions, led on one side by Malevich, who had developed radical theories about a fourth dimension in art represented by non-objective planes, and on the other by Filonov, who with his ‘Masters of Analytical Art’ group (MAI) developed the doctrine of ‘universal flowering,’ an organic process of registering simultaneous sense impressions that combined realism with symbols, neo-primitivism and the fantastic grotesque of the northern Renaissance. In 1926, she also began to work in DetGIz (the Children’s Division of the State Publishing House), an organization that gave work to many avant-garde artists of different tendencies. She met Vera Ermolaeva there and, like her, made illustrations for children’s books, particularly those by the Oberiuty – Nikolai Zabolotsky, Daniil Kharms, and Aleksandr Vvedensky – the emerging generation of poets, writers and artists who could find no other work.

In 1927 Glebova became a member of MAI, with whom she exhibited, and also began to work in scenography, making designs for Wagner’s ‘The Master Singers of Nuremburg’ for the Maly Theater in 1932. In 1929 a large retrospective exhibition of Filonov’s work planned for the Russian Museum remained unopened to the public for three years until it was finally forbidden by the authorities and State patronage dried up. He struggled severely to survive. Although MAI split up in 1932, Glebova remained closely affiliated with Filonov until December 1941 when he died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad. Throughout that harsh winter, she continued making drawings and wrote a diary. Evacuated to Kazakhstan in 1942, she met Vladimir Sterligov, a painter and member of the Malevich circle in Leningrad, who had been arrested and exiled to Kazakhstan with Vera Ermolaeva. They married there and after the war moved back to Leningrad.

The drawings by Glebova shown here sardonically record the everyday scenes she experienced in Almaty during the aftermath of war. With Sterligov, she transposed the independent, autonomous way of working she had learnt in the 1920s and ‘30s into a post-war ‘invisible institute’ that recreated, remodeled and extended the analytical methods they had both learnt. Many important non-official artists studied and showed their work there, and from 1971 to 1973 fifty-two unofficial exhibitions were held in Sterligov’s workshop. Lidya Blinova and Rustam Khalfin set up a related circle in Alma-Ata that operated throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. After Sterligov’s death in 1973, Glebova continued working and exhibiting until her death. Her works are in the collections of the Pushkin Museum and State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, the Yaroslavl Art Museum, the Kostroma Picture Gallery, the Arkhangelsk Museum, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and the Kasteyev State Art Museum, Almaty.

 
TATIANA GLEBOVA (1900-1985)
These works are from Glebova’s Kazakhstan series of works made between 1942 and 1945.
 
Tatiana Glebova, Chechen Woman Selling Wool at the Bazaar, Alma-Ata
watercolour on paper, 65x55cm
 

Tatiana Glebova, Shooting Range
watercolour on paper, 65х55 cm
 

Tatiana Glebova, Butcher’s Shop in the Bazaar, Alma-Ata
watercolour on paper, 65x55cm
 

Tatiana Glebova, Bazaar
watercolour on paper, 55х65cm
 

Tatiana Glebova, Bazaar
watercolour on paper, 39.9х 29.8 cm

Gulfairus Ismailova

(1929-2013) Born in the Kazakh SSR. Lived, and worked in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Considered one of Kazakhstan’s ‘mothers of contemporary art’, painter, actor, film and theatre director, and production designer for film, theatre, and opera, Gulfairus Ismailova first studied at the Almaty Art College in 1944, and then at the Leningrad Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1950 – 1956). She is one of the first Kazakh artists to adapt the rules of Soviet Socialist Realism to take into account the history, national traditions and reality of Kazakhstan. Initially acclaimed as a star in Yefim Aron’s film Botagoz (1957), her influence also extended across painting, theatre design, and education and she became simultaneously a member of the Soviet unions for cinematographers, theatre workers and artists. She worked with Pavel Zaltsman, an avant-garde artist and designer from Leningrad who had worked closely with Filonov, an association that had a strong impact on her work as an artist.

In the early 1970s, Ismailova became the chief designer of the Kazakh State Opera and Ballet Theatre, where she worked for 16 years. During her lifetime, she participated in major exhibitions in Kazakhstan, Russia, GDR, UK, Yugoslavia, Italy, Spain, Japan, and France. Her works are held in museum collections throughout Kazakhstan. She was awarded the Tarlan Award for Contribution to Art (2002); the honour of the People’s Artist of Kazakhstan (1987); Honoured Artist of Kazakhstan (1985); the Order of Friendship of Peoples; the Order of the Badge of Honour (1959) and the Order of Parasat.

 
GULFAIRUS ISMAILOVA (1929-2013)
 
Gulfairus Ismailova, Portrait of Dina Nurpeisova (1965)
oil on canvas, 85х65cm
National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana
Dina Nurpeisova (1861-1955) was a freedom fighter in the national liberation movement of 1916 and also a renowned composer and performer on the dombra (a long-necked lute) in the tradition of Kazakh folk music known as kyuy.
 

Gulfairus Ismailova, Costume design for Er-Targyn, an opera-ballet by E. Brusilovsky based on an ancient Kazakh heroic epic (1967)
gouache on paper, 50x40cm
Courtesy of the V. Sidorkin Collection
 

Gulfairus Ismailova, Costume design for Kyz Zhibek, a folk ballet by E. Brusilovsky (1967)
gouache on paper, 50x40cm
Courtesy of the V. Sidorkin Collection
This story was also made into a two-part film in 1969 which Ishmailova designed and in which she acted. See cat. 21 below
 

Gulfairus Ismailova, Costume designs for Kozy Korpesh and Bayan-Sulu, a folk ballet by E. Brusilovsky (1971)
gouache on paper, 60х150cm
Courtesy of the V. Sidorkin Collection
The film A Poem about Love (1954), designed by Pavel Zaltsman with Aisha Galimbayeva, was based on the same story. See cat. 15 above.
 

GULFAIRUS: Gulfairus Ishmailova and Soviet National Cinematography (2018)
single-channel video, HD, sound, 22’,16:9.
Directed by Almagul Menlibayeva (b. 1969)
This video contains extracts edited from the following films on which Galimbaeva worked as both designer and actress: Botagoz (1957), directed by E. Aron. Here she plays a leading role in a story adapted from a novel by Sabit Mukanov about the travails and revolutionary awakening of a young Kazakh woman who had been sexually harassed by a Tsarist regional governor. Alitet Leaves for the Hills (1949), directed by Mark Donskoy for the Gorky Film Studio, Moscow, 5’ (from original length 1:38). In this historical war drama, she plays an indigenous Chukchi woman, living by Lake Baikal, who, along with other members of her community, is liberated by the Kamchatka Revolutionary Committee. The American colonist-businessmen and exploitative Russian fur traders are defeated so they may become self-sufficient and ‘build a new life in a free land’. Kyz Zhibek [Silk Lady] (1969, first publicly shown 1972), directed by S. A. Khodzhikov at the Alma-Ata Film Studio. 10’ (from original length 2:17). The film was based on a Kazakh folk lyric-epic of the same name; Ishmailova worked here as both production designer and actress, playing the role of the protagonist’s mother. This tragic, yet heroic, love story, set against the background of inter-tribal wars in the 16th and 17th-centuries, is an extended, nomadic reprise of Romeo and Juliet. In true Shakespearean tradition, few people survive

Courtesy of the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Astana, Ruhani Zhangyru, and Kazakhfilm
 

Film poster for Botagoz (1957) designer unknown
Reprinted in Berlin in 2018 by Almagul Menlibayeva and Leslie Ranzoni

Maria Vilkovisky, born 1971 & Ruthie Jenrbekova, born 1973, in Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSSR. Live and work in Almaty, Kazakhstan and Vienna, Austria.

Maria Vilkovisky is a poet, musician, performer, curator, and an employee of Kreolex Zentr, working together with her partner artist Ruth Jenrbekova. With a practice focusing on poetry, experimental sound & vocal, performance, music, writing, queer and feminist theory, Vilkovisky studied at the Kazakh National Kurmangazy Conservatory, Almaty (1991-1996), the Musagethes Literary School for Writers (2008), and the Moscow Curatorial Summer School (2013).

Ruthie Jenrbekova has since 1997 has been involved in various artistic and curatorial activities as a performance artist, educator, film-maker, graphic designer, writer, and employee of Kreolex Zentr, working together with her partner artist Maria Vilkovisky. Currently working on her PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria, Jenrbekova also completed the Moscow Curatorial Summer School (2013), the Musagethes Literary School for Writers (2008), Almaty, and an MA in Urban Ecology at the Biological faculty of Kazakh State University (1995). Her practice focuses on Arts-based research methodologies, performance art, experimental audio and video, comparative anthropology, new materialisms, and feminist ontologies.

Selected exhibitions include: Escapism Training Program, group exhibition, Fabrika CCI, Moscow (2018); Human Rights: 20 Years After, group exhibition, Artmeken gallery, Almaty (2017); In Edenia, a City of the Future, exhibition, Yermilov Center, Kharkiv, Ukraine (2017); Suns and Neons above Kazakhstan, group exhibition, YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku, Azerbaijan (2017). Symbiosis, international artistic and research exhibition, Almaty Botanical Garden (2016); A – Art, F – Feminism, An Actual Dictionary, group exhibition and conference, DAR Institute, Moscow (2015).

Selected joint artistic and curatorial projects include: Inhuman Rights Watch & Listen, sound installation, Artmeken gallery, Almaty (2017); Superformance. Typology of Actions, interactive staged performance, shown at SIGs Space, Almaty (2017); Intermedia 5, interactive theatricalized presentation, Bishkek (2016), Intermedia 3, interactive theatricalized presentation of Central Asian Mental Map, Rosa’s House of Culture, Saint Petersburg, in the framework of The Chto Delat School for Engaged Art (2016).

Key conferences include: Queering Paradigms VIII. Fucking Solidarity: queering concepts on/from a Post-Soviet perspective, international conference, Department for English and American Studies, University of Vienna (2017); Body discourses / Body politix conference, Humboldt University Berlin, [presentation Self-Exoticism in Contemporary Art & Media in Kazakhstan] (2015); The Concepts of the Soviet in Central Asia symposium, SHTAB, Bishkek [presentation Creolization in Central Asia: Outlines for Social Compositionism] (2105).

ARTIST STATEMENT:

 
Kreolex Zentr, Promo (2016), video, 10’ 53”
 
A message from Kreolex Zentr’s Department of Public Relations:

This video as an example of how our organization functions. Being a conceptual project in the genre of imaginary institutions, Kreolex Zentr tries to retain many identities, which we realise may produce some difficulties in understanding our work.

What sense does it make to call ourselves a phantom cultural institution? While not seeking to clarify this question univocally, we, nevertheless, wish to provide lucid explanations of what we do. Our productions seem often simple and amateur; they stretch across a wide range of different formats and means of expression in order to gain a certain educational momentum. This short video was commissioned by the Kreolex HQ for promotional purposes and is meant to make our performances accessible to even wider audiences.

– Kreolex Zentr

Gaisha Madanova: Born 1987 in Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSSR. Lives and works in Munich, Germany, and Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Gaisha Madanova graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the Almaty College of Construction and Management in 2009. In 2018 she graduated from the Munich Academy of Fine Arts (in the Sculpture class of Prof. Hermann Pitz). In her artistic practice she uses different media and techniques – such as silkscreen print, nitro-frottage, video, photo, installations – basing her work on the investigation of questions that reveal the relationship between artificial and natural existence. Topics like ‘watching and being watched’, ‘the body as an expression of the inner self’ or ‘the strategies of transformations and displacement’ can be seen as links through different series of her works.

Madanova is also engaged in curatorial practice, including projects such as: DIYALOG: New Energies, OMV section at the VIENNAFAIR; the contemporary art educational program VIDEO[ARTiFACT], Klaus vom Bruch; special project mikro[smART]raiony, Refunc group, ARTBATFEST, Almaty; video-art program Internal Storage – Not Enough Space?, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. Since 2012 Madanova has also been involved in different projects organized by Goethe-Institut in Kazakhstan. Since 2007 Madanova has been a founding member of the international art collective Artpologist (Art+Antropology), since 2014 she has been a member of the Munich-based art collective Roundabout, and since 2016 co-founder of Kazakhstan-based art communication platform ARTCOM. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of the first conceptual art magazine in Kazakhstan: ALUAN – Exhibition On Paper.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

 
Aluan Magazine, Issue 1 (2015), Art Upside Down
Published by the Goethe Institute, Kazakhstan
 
ALUAN is an exhibition space in the shape of a magazine. Each issue of this ‘exhibition on paper’ will be produced by a guest curator who explores a different art scene, defines a topic, and selects artists and artworks for display. It is a sequence of images, accompanied by a text that can be read as a guided tour. The first issue is curated by Berlin-based art critic and curator Thibaut de Ruyter. Focusing on the art scene of Almaty (the former capital of Kazakhstan), it proposes a historical position in an archive about the city and its artworks that deal with identity and mapping. Central Asia has only a few art institutions and publications that provide accessible information and critical content about contemporary art. ALUAN is a response to this shortage with an approach valid both inside and outside Kazakhstan. Founded by artist and curator Gaisha Madanova in 2014, the magazine is published in three languages (Kazakh, English, Russian) and proposes an alternative way of making exhibitions.

Gaisha Madanova, Beam Me to the Presence (2017)
Text installation
 
In 1877, when the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli drew the first detailed map of the planet Mars, he imagined it as an earthly paradise. He named different regions Eden, Elysium, Arcadia and Utopia, the last in honour of Thomas More. In 1976 the spacecraft Viking 2 landed exactly on Utopia and began exploring Mars. In 2014 a company founded by scientists and former NASA personnel encouraged ‘the inhabitants of Earth to send personal messages and pictures to Mars by radio transmission’. 237 messages were selected and sent — at the speed of light — as a global shout-out from Earth. The authors of these texts revealed their hopes and faith in the possibilities of passing frontiers into a new world; there was a new possibility of making everything right. These messages had the potential of being the first significant words to start a new communication, but they also faced the risk of being lost on the way and never heard. This artwork is based on one of the thousands of messages that were originally submitted. By exhibiting it in the temple of knowledge that each library or gallery represents, this text, with its honest hopes, gets another chance to exist by finding potential readers.

This work was first made for UTOPIUM, a group exhibition produced by the Julian Rosefeldt project class for the library of the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich in 2017.

– Gaisha Madanova

Installation Text:
 
You inspire us to dream of a second chance to do things right- to create a place where everyone is equal, where everyone is valued, where everyone is welcomed, You give us the chance to forget our differences and focus on our humanity. I imagine on Mars we would all just be humans. That in itself makes reaching you worthwhile. The goal of reaching you will encourage the best in us. We will need innovation, determination, and commitment. We will need our young people to bring their imagination and sense of adventure. We will need to value our teachers and refocus on our educational system to prepare our youth for this challenge. We will need to hold our leaders accountable to something bigger than themselves and now. By committing to this endeavor, we may rediscover our sense of national pride; however, instead of starting another space race, we should work with other nations to reach a common goal. Hopefully when we reach you, it will be because we want – not need- to be there.
(- Patti, John, Zack, Rachel, & Brett Hester)

Born 1986 in Semey, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Astana, Kazakhstan.

Aigerim Mazhitkhan graduated from the Kazakh National Academy of Art in 2009, specializing in Art Criticism and Art History. Turning her critical eye back onto the architecture and public art of her city, in the works shown in this exhibition Mazhitkhan addresses the rapid development of Kazakhstan’s new capital city, built-up almost from nothing over the past twenty years.

Selected recent exhibitions and festivals include: the Platonov Festival, Voronezh, Russia (2018); ArtBat Festival and the School of Artistic Gesture, Almaty (2017); Act of Creation, Eurasian Cultural Alliance, Almaty (2017); Artprospekt Festival, Almaty, 1st Place Golden Diploma award for Images of the Capital (2015); Magmart 9 International Video Festival, Naples, Italy (2015); Alash – Page of Our History, solo exhibition, Palace of Independence, Astana (2014).

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Aigerim Mazhitkhan, Metaphors of the City (2017), video, 4’50”
 
Astana, the capital, is built and expanded according to an approved general plan. Its buildings differ in their external form and concept. Because some of them become associated with specific objects by way of their appearance, the residents of the capital give different names to official buildings. For example, the National Archive is called the ‘Egg’; the buildings of ‘Samruk-Kazyn’ are ‘Buckets’; the Astanaalik Business Center has become ‘The Syringe’; the Baiterek is popularly named after the lollipop brand ‘Chupa-Chups’; and so on.
As an artist, I wanted to investigate the causes of this phenomenon. I interviewed the residents of the city, but I found their opinions contradictory. While some of them were saying that it is very convenient, the rest were sure that it was not ethical to give such nicknames to the main sights of the city. This is a not too serious examination of the citizens’ of Astana perception of and attitude to their city.

Aigerim Mazhitkhan, Images of the Capital (2015), video, 8’24”
 
Sculpture has always been a vital part of architecture that completes the architects’ ideas. Together they create a single ensemble. Today, passing along the left bank of Astana, we can see a certain disunity and lack of proper combination between sculpture and the high-rise urban architecture that surrounds it. A lot of money has been spent, but the sculptures that have been commissioned look like space fillers and have been poorly made. Looking at this discrepancy, I ask the opinion of both professional figures within the art world and ordinary residents of the capital about these sculptures.
 
– Aigerim Mazhitkhan

Born 1969 in Almaty, Kazakh SSR. Lives and works in Almaty and Berlin.

Video artist and photographer Almagul Menlibayeva holds an MFA from the Art and Theatre University of Almaty. She works primarily in multi-channel video, photography and mixed media installation and her work addresses such critical issues of post-Soviet modernity as 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 conjunction with her solo exhibition ‘Transformation’ at the Grand Palais in Paris (France, 2016-2017), she was awarded the prestigious Chevalier Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2017. Other 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) and the Winner of the Main Prize of the International Film Festival Kino Der Kunst (2013) in Munich, Germany.

Menlibayeva has gained international recognition by participating in: the Venice Biennale, Italy (2005, 2007, 2009, 2015); Sydney Biennale, Australia (2006, 2012); the Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2010); the Mediterranean Biennale, Israel (2010); the Moscow Biennale, Russia (2011, 2015); the Kiev Biennial, Ukraine (2013); the Daegu Photo Biennale (2016); and the Gangwon International Biennale, South Korea (2018).

Selected solo exhibitions include: 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); Kissing Totems, Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, New York, USA (2008). Recent selected group exhibitions include: Haifa Museum, Israel (2018); Neues Museum in Nuremberg, Germany (2018, 2016); 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).

Almagul Menlibayeva, Steppen Baroque (2003), video, 11’
Sound by OMFO ( G. Popov)

The stage for Almagul Menlibayeva’s video performance Steppen Baroque is the bare, open steppe – the archetypal ‘national landscape’ of Central Asian nomadic culture. In this landscape, a group of seven women appear like mythical spirits, clothed in flowing colourful fabrics or completely naked, holding skulls of totem animals in their hands as offerings to gods. Menlibayeva has dedicated this work to her seven ancestors, thus referring to the nomadic tradition of knowing by heart seven generations of one’s ancestors: memory creates history and continuity.

Menlibayeva says that she wants to give a face to central Asian women, because they are unknown and obscure in the contemporary world. In the turmoil of history, female identity in central Asia has been an instrument of politics: the communists transformed the central Asian woman into a symbol of their civilizing mission, promoting her as the ideal woman and a strong and self-disciplined worker. Today this strength and discipline are indeed needed in the new circumstances, when the transition to a market economy has brought sweeping changes to everyday life and social roles. In Menlibayeva’s art, woman appears as a strong matriarch of the nomadic period, independent and free from patriarchal control and oppression. Steppen Baroque also proclaims a new potential for individual freedom in its open celebration of traditional shamanism and female nudity, both forbidden during the Soviet era, when the communist regime tried to ‘tame’ the cultural and religious heritage of Central Asia and assimilate it into Soviet ideology.(Extracted from Jari-Pekka Vanhala, Steppen Baroque as a Spiritual Renaissance, October 2007, http://www.universe-in-universe.org)

Almagul Menlibayeva, The Altar of the East (2018):
1. Tokamak (2016), 9-channel video installation
2. Tokamak (2016), photograph on aludibond
3. The Constructor (2016), photograph on aludibond
4. Altar of the East, 2018, photograph on aludibond

Tokamak is a complex installation based on different images of KTM Tokamak, the experimental, materials-testing thermonuclear fusion reactor that started operation at the National Nuclear Centre 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, that gives the title to the whole Tokamak installation, 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.

Born 1961 in Shymkent, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Shymkent.

Mirzagalikova graduated from the Shymkent Art School in 1984 and from the Graphic Art Department of the Shymkent Pedagogical Institute in 1990. In 1986, she began attending classes at the Studio of “Spatial Structural Composition”, which were supervised by V.A. Simakov. Here, she studied the laws of visual perception, ideas of artistic form, and the harmonious organization of space and structure. Consecutive exercises were carried out as part of this and an intuitive organization of structural construction was developed. In addition to factual knowledge, significant importance was attached to the preservation of the individuality of artistic thinking and to the values of regional culture. During 1989, she actively participated in group exhibitions of the students of the studio. Since 1995, she has participated in the exhibitions of the Red Tractor (‘Kyzyl Tractor’) group, Kazakhstan’s celebrated art collective, noted for their feverish experimentations in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Known for reorienting nomadic, Sufi, and shamanistic philosophies as a new artistic language over the past three decades, their work continues to chronicle the seismic socioeconomic and political shifts in Central Asia.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

 
The works shown here are from three different stages of my practice:

Woman and Steppe (1997), from the first stage, reflects the search for means of artistic expression for impressions from the surrounding world. Plasticity of form should fascinate as well as being in tune with the surrounding environment, the climate, and the fragrance of nature. Restrained within a narrow range of warm colors, this work allows an appreciation of the plasticity of line.
 
The second work, Peak of Abai (1996), is sustained in a cold, monotonous colour scheme with identical, strictly placed objects that direct us to the specific meaning and purpose of the picture. The basis for this work is the importance of Abai Kunanbayev for Kazakh people. (Abai Kunanbayev (1845 – 1904) was a Kazakh poet, composer, philosopher and cultural reformer. His words are also cited by Anar Aubakir in her work.)
 
Song of the Shaman Woman (2008), the third picture, is a mystical agony. The exit of sensual female energy. There are orgies that emerge from the onslaught of magic word forms that manage to gain stability in this world.
 
– Gulnar Mirzagalikova

Born 1984 in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Gulnur Mukazhanova graduated from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in Almaty (2006), and the Weissensee Art Academy in Berlin, Germany (2013). Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses textile art, photography, video, installation, and sculpture. Mukazhanova’s art is a confrontation of two different cultures but also a dialogue between them. From her Central Asian roots she keeps a strong physical relation to traditional materials that are not only used for their aesthetics but have a symbolic and historic meaning. While living in Germany she has come to confront questions of feminism, globalization, and ethnology.

Mukazhanova has participated in international Biennales such as: A Time for Dreams, IV Moscow International Biennale of Young Art, Moscow, (2014); and the Krasnoyarsk Biennale, Russia (2015). Her solo exhibitions include: Artwin Gallery, Moscow, Russia (2016); Iron Women, Almaty, Tengri-Umai Gallery (2010); Wertlösigkeit der Tradition, Kazakhstan-German Society, Berlin (2010). Her work is held in international private collections: Fondazione 107, Turin, Italy; Krasnoyarsk Museum, Russia; La Metive, Moutier-d’Àhun, France.

Selected recent group exhibitions include: All the World´s Collage, Aspan Gallery, Almaty, Kazakhstan (2018); Astana Art Show, TSE Art Destination Gallery, Astana, Kazakhstan (2018); Focus Kazakhstan: Post-nomadic Mind, Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London (2018); Cosmoscow, international contemporary art fair, Moscow, Russia (2018); Interlocal, in association with Blue Container on the New Silk Road, Duisburg, Germany (2018); Time & Astana: After Future, National Museum, Astana, Kazakhstan (2017); The Story Retells, Daegu Art Factory Daegu, South Korea (2017); Expo 2017: Future Energy, Astana, Kazakhstan (2017); Metamorphoses, Pörnbach Contemporary, Pörnbach, Germany (2016); Did you know… ?, Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (2016); Cosmoscow, Moscow, Russia (2015); Dissemination, Stadtgalerie Brixen, Brixen (Bressanone), South Tyrol (2014); Nomads, Artwin Gallery, Moscow (2014); Synekdoche, Freies Museum, Berlin, Germany (2013).

ARTIST STATEMENT:

 
Gulnur Mukazhanova, Iron Woman (2010), metal object and photograph on aludibond
 

In these works, the artist undertakes a personal research of identity using two different media – photography and objects made of metal. She explores a woman’s body in the conflict zones of sensuality and ideology – at the intersections of personal and social environment, of ethnic vs. global culture, of modernity vs. tradition. Significations of sexuality translated by the photos move between the accessible and the prohibited, between the carnal and the sacred.
 

Gulnur Mukazhanova, Mankurts in the Megapolis (2011-12)
Mankurt 1 and Mankurt 2, two photographs on aludibond
 
The subject of this project is a white wedding dress, as well as the general disappearance of traditional wedding dresses in Kazakhstan – a topic connected directly with the problems of identity and loss of cultural values.

The title Mankurts in the Megapolis reflects this loss, as well as the fact that we have forgotten our origins. In Central Asia, the concept of mankurtism describes the loss of national roots, traditional values and culture. Previously it referred to slaves, called mankurts, who completely lost the memory of their past life under duress. Today, this term is used to describe people who have, consciously or unconsciously, adopted other cultural values. This loss of memory concerns the displacement of manners, morals and even language; a not uncommon phenomenon in the time of globalization.

The symbolic form of the wedding gown is understood worldwide. In earlier times, when each culture had its own original form of bridal gown, it displayed an immense wealth of material, ritual and cultural diversity. Since the beginning of the 20th century the white bridal fashion has been established almost all over the world, and many people now regard it as their own deeply rooted tradition.

The new set of values that characterize contemporary life in Kazakhstan have become so embedded, that it seems almost impossible to connect them with ancient nomadic traditions. Perhaps, because we are no longer nomadic, this no longer makes sense. I should like to know, what we, as a new generation, should keep and discard.

If we want to keep certain traditions, we must be able to believe in them, and not just imitate their form. This is often seen in the new designs for saukele [traditional Kazakh wedding head dresses], where originally meaningful symbols have become little more than primitive forms of ornamentation. The least we can do is to appreciate the meaning and the wisdom of the traditions which have been passed down to us from our ancestors.

Reflecting upon this, I wonder whether it makes any sense at all to worry, or if it would be better to live simply in the flow of events without thinking about them? However, I think that if we wish to meet this process of change with dignity, without being just one of the herd, we have to be prepared to examine both our thoughts and our emotions. Only in this way will we get to know who we are.
 
– Gulnur Mukazhanova

Born 1981 in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Katya Nikonorova received a degree in Architecture and Urban Planning at the Kazakh Academy of Architecture and Civil Engineering in Almaty. Since 2000, she has focused on contemporary fine arts practice, participating in exhibitions, seminars and workshops internationally that have included exhibitions in Almaty, Bishkek, Moscow, London, Paris, Turin, Singapore, Strasbourg, San Francisco and Manchester. Her work frequently addresses the topic of urbanism and global questions of identity; her most recent works focus on the tradition of female shamanism as a way of exploring the position of women in contemporary society. To this end, she has created KATIPAAPISM, a pseudo-religious art movement, centered around the ‘media-medium’ of Katipa Apai – the first Central Asian Goddess in her invented personal religion. Since 2012, she has organized her eponymous ‘Biennale of Katya Nikonorova’ (Almaty, Kazakhstan) followed by the 2nd ‘True Biennale of Katya Nikonorova’ (San Francisco, USA), and the ‘III Beingnalle’ (Almaty-Bishkek). She also runs an ongoing online broadcast of the art-doc-serial The Adventures of Katipa apai, the first two series of which are shown here.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

 
Katya Nikonorova, A Bouquet for March 8th: Tulips (2013)
 

March 8th in Kazakhstan – International Women’s Day – is an important commemoration of women’s struggle for equal rights. But long ago it became a cheerful holiday celebrating only women’s beauty and sexuality. And, like every holiday, it ends with a sumptuous banquet. But that is how it ends for men. On the women’s side, it just looks like another day with a double dose of household chores: cleaning, cooking, cleaning.

Katya Nikonorova, The Adventures of Katipa apai (2014-16)
 
Who is this Katipa?
 

The Great White central Asian G….ss Katipa Apai is back on Earth to restore the ancient religion of Tengrism by renaming it Katipaapism. Katipa Apai, an emanation of the ancient Turkic goddess Umay (the Mother Earth), is the G….ss of one-way love, contemporary art, same-sex marriage and queer-communists.

At the basis of her liturgy is the radical art practice of the materialization (manifestation) of emptiness that, in common parlance, is described as ‘contemporary art’. The G….ss also sends messages to believers in the form of documentaries and video-art. Occasionally an epiphany occurs when Katipa manifests Herself to parishioners in order to pass on to them sacred knowledge.

As a style within contemporary art, katipaapism includes the creation of hierotopias (environments, land art, objects for mystery plays, and liturgies), icon paintings (according to the canons of abstract painting and collage), and the transmission of the Message through art documentaries.

All these activities are aimed at neutralizing the deletarious effects of the Anthropocene era in an artistic and abstract manner through media-therapy, googlemaps-geo-therapy, quartz sterilization of environments, and Kazakh Feng Shui.

The Adventures of Katipa apai:

The video serial Adventures of Katipa apai currently has 2 seasons, with a total of 18 episodes: Season 1: IX Epistles of Katipa apai; and Season 2: Measure of Faith. Containing messages for future generations about Katipa’s birth, life, and how to solve the global problems of humanity through her methods. Every episode is the documentation of Katipa apai’s interactions: either through flashmobs, art interventions, improvisations or exhibitions, shot in Kazakhstan, India, USA and Kyrgyzstan. This serial of videos transmits positive messages not only via audio/video, but also at high-vibration levels of perception. The other way of using this video content is as mental detergent in public spaces (in cinema theaters, and so).

Season 1: IX Epistles of Katipa apai
 
1. Apai on Ivan Kupala Day (0:56)
Performance documentation.
Anima held animus tool. The Mountain is a symbol of Nation. Katipa is changing the Nation.

2. Divinition to Katipa (1:48)
Interaction with space.

3. Go Find Yourself (2:00)
Documentation of intervention.
As the ancient Diogenes, Katipa apai is walking through public spaces places with a flashlight and looking for a Man. Out of despair at the impossibility of expressing her sexuality, that she has to hide with a hijab, she commits an action, sacrilege, something perverse for the eyes of the audience, that the viewer can only guess about in the end. She strikes the recognizable pose of a woman who found herself (the Statue of Liberty).

4. Birth of Katipa apai (4:15)
Documentation of improvisation.
According to the ancient Greek Myth, the goddess of beauty, Aphrodite, was born from the ocean foam. Central Asian Goddess Katipa apai is also born from the Kapchagai’s foam with the help of 3 Goddesses; the psychological archetypes of the modern understanding of femininity: hostess, girl, lover.

5. Family life of Katipa apai (5:45)
Documentation of improvisation.

6. Katipa Leads American Youth to the Truth (4:00)
Documentation of intervention.
At a meeting at the Civil Center in San Francisco, young Americans hide their faces with black masks; opposition of Black and White. Pure Soul leads youth to the Truth (subscribe on the wall).

7. Katipa Remains on Alkatraz (4:05)
Documentation of intervention.
Katipa apai explores the legendary tourist attraction, the Alcatraz prison. Relationships, family life, society, country, body, dress, and place in this short film are metaphors for imprisonment in the material world. In the 1970s Alcatraz was occupied by hippies, but this short period of freedom on this island was forcibly discontinued by the authorities. And than State made Alcatraz a paid attraction. We are visiting a prison being prisoners and never guessing it.
So where is our Freedom?

8. Asking for Power (1:45)
Documentation of a ritual.
Katipa is making a ritual of Sufi whirling. Archangels on the Columns of the Palace of Arts look on, and after she calls upon their Forces, they take her into their highest circle. Now Katipa was hovering over the waters (and had the Power to change humanity to a better life).

9. Katipa Stops the War (4:04)
Documentation of intervention.
In New York’s well-known Brooklyn district, Katipa visits the Hasidic neighbourhood, showing her kind face and positive image in hijab in order to stop the war between normal people. She begins at a school for girls.

 
Season 2: Measure of Faith

10. 10th Epistle of Katipa apai (0:54)
The abstract-mystic-energetic-cosmo-Epistle was shot on her 33rd Birthday, on the occasion of the exhibition IX Epistles of Katipa.

11. Pure Water (4:15)
Conscious De-urination Method of Katipa apai. A weapon against War?
In every person’s life there is a moment when the inner world of man becomes one with the outer. But every time we miss this sacred moment because of our ignorance. At the time of urination Humanity literally unites with all the life on the planet. The flow is like the umbilical cord, that connects us with the Earth, with Water, with all life on the Planet. And this connection is sustainable (one of the main codes of ecological thinking for the new Millennium). Imagine what we miss every time? You need to be truly focused on the process. Breath. On the exhale, relax and act. You can say to yourself: “Only Love, only Peace pouring out of me”… And the pleasure that you get, give to the outer world. Depending on your personal “advancement”, you can send flows from the heart chakra (and your enjoyment will flow from the heart, changing the structure of water in you and outside of you on an energetic level), third eye (and you will feel a genuine unity with all that is happening around you). You can observe the first results within a week. The practice of concentrated de-urination in the future facilitates a return to awareness. The process of urination is similar to meditation. Moreover, the benefits of regular meditation are hard to overestimate.

12. Casting for the Leader (3:00)
Documentation of intervention.
At a Muslim Festival in the Islamic city of Jodhpur, India, only Men are engaged in the festival’s procession, while women sit and passively look on. Katipa apai climbs on an old tractor to show everyone women’s attitude to take an active role in social life.

13. Ibid, After 20 Years (2:47)
Documentation of intervention.
Free society, a lot of water, equality of rights, etc… What happens after Katipa’s leadership.

14. Opening Ceremony (5:45)
Katipa opens doors to heaven and calls us to come with her to the Bright Future.

15. Appearance of the Rainbow Fairy (3:45)
Documentation of intervention.

16. 8th River (6:20)
Documentation of exhibition in Ile-Alatau National park.

17. Phantom (4:18)
Interaction with installation “Imitating nature”.

18. Big Almaty Flashmob (4:50)
Documentation of flashmob.
Katipa wants to make a new Holy Day: the Day of Water on 8/08 each year.
Can we come together and make a big circle of unity with Nature and with ourselves? The idea of a flashmob is for the community to demonstrate to itself that “I am.” The idea of collective gratitude will be implemented as follows: Those who wish to participate will come to Lake Sayran and encircle it (there should be enough participants so that we can form a closed circle around the lake), after which everyone will inwardly thank Nature and the Great Spirit of Almaty. After this, the flashmob will be concluded. This event will provide city residents with a powerful collective experience, something that forms the foundation of community. And if a community is aware of its own existence, purpose, and power of intention, it can transform itself in accordance with the laws of sustainable development, of co-operation between Nature and Human.
 
– Katya Nikonorova

Saule Suleimenova

Born 1970 in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Almaty.

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: 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.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

 
Saule Suleimenova, SKYLINE (2017), plastic bags on polycarbonate sheet

In January 2017 the Kazakhstan government adopted a new law that obliged all citizens who do not live in the place of their original registration to re-register. This created a vast uproar in the service centres responsible for the registration where thousands of people waited in long lines. For me these lines became a part of my project Somewhere in the Great Steppe, where the line of people becomes a skyline, which marks the horizontal border of the steppe with the heavens.

RESIDUAL MEMORY:

In my series of works called Residual Memory, I investigate certain periods of history that are designated as historical traumas and are recorded in rare, residual photos and on film. While I depict these scenes in collages of residual materials (plastic bags), I try to consider and understand how they happened, as a form of therapy for purification and acceptance. For a long time, information about these historical times was hidden not only at an official level, but also people themselves preferred not to remember the traumas of the past. My work re-presents and re-establishes emotional contact with these times in order to understand ourselves better through this act.

Saule Suleimenova, Famine / Asharshylyk, 1932. The Exodus of the Kazakh People during the Famine (2018), plastic bags on polyethylene film

Asharshylyk’ in Kazakh means hunger or famine. The Kazakh famine of 1930–1933 is also known in Kazakhstan as the ‘genocide by hunger’. During this time more than 1.5 million people died and hundreds of thousands of Kazakh families moved to other countries to try to survive. I show a fragment of this captured in a photograph where you can see how starving people left their native lands in search of a better life. The work is made out of plastic bags and fragments of wrappings for chocolates, bread and coffee which are mass-produced in Kazakhstan.

Saule Suleimenova, Famine / Asharshylyk, 1932. The Surviving Children (2018), plastic bags on polyethylene film

Some historians and scholars consider this famine as a genocide directed against the Kazakh people. After it was over, the NKVD [secret police] searched the steppe for boys who had survived (mostly 7-11 years old) and sent them to orphanages in the Russian part of the Soviet Union. Kazakh families tried to save the boys by sacrificing the rest of the family. Getting to the orphanage, the children grew up as rootless ‘Soviet’ children and could not remember their original language. By the beginning of World War II in 1941, they were at the age of conscription and were enlisted and sent to the war first where many died as ‘cannon fodder’. There is no exactly known number of victims of the Asharshylyk, but the fate of these children could be also be added to their number. (Ref. demographer Dr. M. Tatimov, PhD Political Science).

Saule Suleimenova, Youth Riot / Zheltoksan, December 1986 (2018), plastic bags on polyethylene film

In 1986, in Alma-Ata, then the capital of Kazakhstan, there was an impulsive uprising of Kazakh youth for the first time in many years. Thousands of young people, mostly students, came out to protest against Gennady Kolbin, the new Russian head of the Kazakh SSR, and were brutally suppressed by the authorities. After these events, spontaneous waves of protest against Soviet national policies also began to emerge in many other republics of the U.S.S.R. The photo, which provides the basis for my work, is very well known in Kazakhstan. At that time, I also went to the New Square where the demonstrations started. I came alone and quickly joined others. We marched together, with linked arms, shouting “Long Live Kazakhstan!”.
 
Saule Suleimenova, The Three Brides (2015), plastic bags on plastic tablecloth on wooden board

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.
 
– Saule Suleimenova

Gulmaral Tatibayeva

Born 1982, Scherbakty, Kazakhstan. Lives and works in Astana, Kazakhstan.

Gulmaral Tatibayeva received a Bachelors degree in design from the Kazakh National Academy of Arts in 2002. She is a member of the Union of Artists of Kazakhstan; the Eurasian Designers Union; the Eurasian Creative Guild; and the art group ‘KADMII QYZYL’. She has participated in many national and international exhibitions and competitions; she won the Grand Prix in the Astana city competition for the best billboard design to promote family values (2014) and has exhibited in the First Astana Art Salon; Plein Air Aktobe, an international symposium of Art (2015); the new media lab in EXPO-2017 at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; AstanaArtFest, Astana Contemporary Art Centre (2015); International Festival of Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, (2017); the Eurasia Sculpture Biennale – International Biennial Of Sculpture Art, Astana (2017); Days of Culture of Kazakhstan in Turkey, Istanbul (2017). Her works may be found in museums in Kazakhstan, and in private and public collections in Kazakhstan, Jordan, Turkey, Holland, Russia, and Great Britain.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Gulmaral Tatibayeva, Untitled (2018), installation: wooden scaffolding, women’s clothes

This work reflects on the role of women as a stable point in the family. Its framework echoes the physical and moral strength traditionally displayed by women in a nomadic way of life where the woman always remained in the background. During times of migration and resettlement, preservation of the way of life rested on the shoulders of women. The yurt was not just a nomadic dwelling, but a cultural centre, a place that sheltered family values.

The great famine in the U.S.S.R. from 1932-1933 united many women from around the world in mutual assistance in order to survive. Today you can hear many stories of women from other countries who had been banished to camps on Kazakh land. They were met by Kazakh women who fed them in secret, giving these exiles hope and strength to endure. It speaks of their strong spirit, endurance, humanity and compassion.

A modern woman works in other conditions. She has the opportunity to select housing, appliances, transportation, medical care, and other amenities. Times have changed, and with them the people. The life of a modern nomad requires resistance against stress. Now it is important to survive a marriage morally, to endure the selfishness of society which may affect the family, and to build a welcoming and stable hearth.

This installation mirrors both the shape of a traditional Kazakh yurt and Norman Foster’s architectural landmark, the Khan Shatyr building in Astana. It is assembled out of women’s garments: old dresses, scarves and items of Kazakh national dress clothe the outside of the structure; while the inside is clad in items donated by women in Berlin, all inhabitants of the city who originate from elsewhere. The Khan Shatyr is a shopping and entertainment centre built as a symbol of the modern nomad. Yet it’s position remains fixed, and women now voyage from all corners of Kazakhstan to shop at its boutiques, eat at it’s restaurants, and entertain their children at it’s attractions. Women have passed their role of guardian of the nomadic home into the hands of trade and modern commerce.

I have noticed that Berlin boasts its own version of the Khan Shatyr, ironically also built as an entertainment centre. A symbol of the modern reconstruction of post-unification Berlin, The Sony Centre repeats the silhouette of the yurt, yet it was intended to symbolise Mount Fuji, a Japanese national symbol, as sacred as the protective image of the traditional Kazakh yurt.
 
– Gulmaral Tatibayeva

Elena Vorobyeva

Born 1959 in Balkanabat (former Nebit Dag), Turkmenistan. Lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Elena Vorobyeva was educated at the Kazakh State Institute of Theatre and Art in Almaty (1985-1990). Selected solo exhibitions include: The Artist Is Asleep, Kasteyev Museum of Arts, Almaty (2015); Yelena Vorobyeva and Viktor Vorobyev: Provincial Sets, Laura Bulian Gallery, Milan (2013); Solo exhibition, LES, Almaty (2013); In Search of Reason…, Tengri-Umai Gallery, Almaty (2010); Kazahkstan: Blue Period, Laura Bulian Gallery, Milan (2009); VIP (Very Impotent Persons), Tengri-Umai Gallery, Almaty (2009); Vtoraia popytka materializatsii [Second Materialisation Attempt], Tengri-Umai Gallery, Almaty (2008); Hitchkock’s Teapot, Art Navat Gallery, Almaty (2003); Solo show, Milchstrassengalerie, Munich (2000); Solo show, Offen Haus Oberwart, Oberwart (1999); Solo exhibition, Soros Foundation for Contemporary Art, Almaty (1996); Solo show, Ular Gallery, Almaty (1995).

Recent selected group exhibitions include: Eurasian Utopia: Post Scriptum, Suwon I’Park Museum of Art, Suwon (2018); Phantom Stories: Leitmotifs of Post-Soviet Asia, Lunds Konsthall, Lund, Sweden (2018); Human Condition, National Centre for Contemporary Art, Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre, MMOMA, Moscow (2018); At the Corner: City, Place, People, Tselinny Center for Contemporary Culture, Almaty (2018); Alternativnye Tezisy: Group Show of Contemporary Central Asian Art, Esentai Gallery, Almaty (2018); Water Stream, Artbat Fest’9, Almaty (2018); 1st April Competition, Bishkek (2018); VIVA ARTE VIVA, 57th Venice Biennale, Venice (2017); Suns and Neons, Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku (2017); Esli gora ne idet k Magometu… [If the Mountain Will not Come to Muhammad…], 1st April Competition, Bishkek (2017); Not Not Not, Asanbay Center, Bishkek (2017); Human Rights: 20 Years Later, ARTMEKEN, Almaty (2017); Painting Resistance, Aspan Gallery, Almaty (2017); Symbiosis, Botanical Gardens, Almaty (2016); 2nd Astana Art Fest, Astana (2016); Limited Liability Pavilion 2.0, Closer Art Centre, Kyiv (2016); Post/Nachalo [Post/Beginning], Kazakh-British Technical University, Almaty (2016); Vzgliad v buduscheie: aktual’noie nasledie [Towards Future: Contemporary Heritage], National Museum, Astana (2016); East Kazakhstan Regional Nevzorovs’ Museum of Fine Arts, Semey, Kazakhstan (2016); 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Gallery of Modern Art | Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane (2015); BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places, MOMENTUM, Berlin (2015); Topografica, American University of Central Asia, Bishkek (2015); The Practices of Contact, 11th Krasnoyarsk Biennale, Krasnoyarsk (2015); The Beast and the Sovereign, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona (2015); Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2015).

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Elena Vorobyeva, The Return Will Follow… (2008)

[This essay,Vozvrashchenie Sleduyet (The Return Will Follow) is extracted from a longer text by Elena Vorobyeva that appeared in Vtoraya Popytka Materializatsii, (The Second Attempt at Materialisation) (exh. cat.), 2008, Amaty, Tengri Umae, p.8. Translation by Evgeniya Kartashova and Georgy Istigechev.]

The name of one of my earliest works was the triptych The return will follow; this title now seems especially symbolic to me, and I’ll try to explain why.

Not an artist

For a long time, I associated the word ‘artist’ with something artificial. ‘Artists’ (mostly men) thought themselves very special. Beards, mustaches, long hair, velvet trousers or jackets – meaningful looks filled with ‘philosophical’ content – were the distinctive signs I used to distinguish them from ‘ordinary’ people. They were called ‘bohemians’, with a mysterious (dissolute) way of life, which was also a sign of their profession. My compassionate aunt warned me in advance: ‘Lena, do not marry an artist – they are all alcoholics …’

These were not just artists, they had additional layers of specialization: easel painting, graphics, sculpture, monumental art, applied arts, and so on. The handicraft and workshop aspects of their activity was decisive here. Attending a ‘central’ university was particularly prestigious in the 1970s and ‘80s – the “Mukhinka” (Mukhina Institute of Industrial Arts in Leningrad), the “Stroganovka” (Moscow State Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts) or the “Surikovsky” (Surikov Art Institute, the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture), for example. Their graduates were immediately admitted to the Union of Artists as ‘valuable young cadres’. The word ‘Member’ had particular significance in relation to them – all ‘Members’ had certificates and looked down at ‘non-members’. They thought that they alone had the right to be called ‘fully-fledged’ artists. This caste always worked in the ‘Oner studios, they had their own arts council, their own exhibitions, their own periodic congresses and their own chairman. Since then relatively little has changed (except for the ideology of course). They even still have the same chairman.

At the other extreme were the underground artists. They opposed themselves to official Soviet culture, led a semi-submerged life, arranged exhibitions in apartments and considered themselves ‘real’. The main reason for this was their position of confrontation – a kind of dissidence – and also the belief that they were much better acquainted with the history of the forbidden Russian avant-garde and with the modern trends of western art than anyone else. This gave them a sense of exclusivity, an entry into a special realm. In this world, it was considered good to be a follower of any teaching and to continue in art someone else’s formal line. Some were following Filonov, others Sterligov, there also were some who took American pop art for a model. As one artist-curator from Samara explained to me, being a disciple of Sterligov, which he considered himself to be, was very profitable – from the fathers of the founders of the Russian avant-garde to now, a clear line was formed, a holy shadow was laid down. As a result, your works acquired legitimacy in the history of art, and hence a very positive assessment, including a financial benefit.

Everyone knew everything, and they cleared up any difficulty with cleverness, saying ‘everything had been invented long ago, take it, use it, just change the context!’ – we were, after all, standing in the backyard of the era of postmodernism.

Separating myself from those and the others, I repeated to myself: ‘I’m not an artist,’ particularly if someone called me that.

Primitivists

In 1990, after graduating from the faculty of monumental painting at the Alma-Ata Art Institute, I was in complete uncertainty about my profession and future prospects. The USSR was about to collapse, there was chaos everywhere, and monumental artists were no longer needed. I’d never seen anything like this before…

The only thing I wanted was to figure out was what ‘art’ was (certainly not a craft). By trying to do this I understood, through some cunning, almost magical, way of self-disclosure, the phenomenon of distinct entities in an open form.

Only in painting did I see the presence or absence of ‘art’. Other forms were shut off for me due to lack of information. That is, I, of course, knew that there was Duchamp in France, and Warhol in America and pop art, as phenomena, but this was abstract knowledge and not applicable to my own experience.

TStrangely enough, ‘art’, for me, was more present in the pictures of naive artists, who were not burdened by their training, academic approach or theory, than in the works of professionals. Excessive education seemed to interfere with the manifestation of what was important. A little later the secret of the art of primitivists began to unfold for me – a process of cognition of the world that took place immediately at the time the picture was painted. And these artists always wanted to learn something (unlike those who had already been taught to paint and draw ‘correctly’). They had no concept of style and were therefore free; in thinking about form they submitted only to their inner instinct. Being attentive primarily to themselves, naive artists have a heightened awareness of the world of real things. The only thing they lack is the ability to abstract, but this is not a prerogative of the child’s mind. They feel all the time to be ‘not real artists, but they just want to become one of them. The energy of this desire enters the fabric of their work and fills it with life. That is why I like Greek “archaic” art so much. It is filled with hidden potential energy, only later did it reveal itself in classical art, and then it dried up, splashed out in the riot of Hellenistic forms.

Oil on canvas

I had a desire to master this kind of energy and, literally, to put it to work.

Gradually, I determined for myself what paintings were, as I understood them. First of all, they are objects (in the sense of art terminology). In this case, the ‘content’ of a picture cannot be described using classical definitions of genre – landscape, still life, portrait, etc., regardless of what is formally represented. If the picture is an object, then the relations within it are formed according to a special scenario. Here, all the technical parameters – the size and format of the canvas, its elasticity, the plastic properties of the paint, the tools and methods of applying the paint to the canvas – are of the utmost importance.

It can encapsulate my misgivings about this moment in my painting by a single word: no.

I do no work, this leads me in the right direction.

No drawing, since I draw nothing and do not invent in advance; no painting, since I do not use brushes, but would rather produce an image, by moulding it with oil paint.

No imitating nature, since I do not work from nature, but also no formal abstraction, since empty conventions simplify and ‘flatten’ painting.

From the point of view of ‘content’, I have no need for ‘literature’, that is, the images in my pictures should not carry any unnecessary semantic load or be an illustration of anything. This prevents direct perception. I wanted to do things that could not be retold, that is, their content could not be verbalized.

No pathos or tension, but an unintended irony arises along the way: the senses.

As for those things that inhabit my canvases and have some relation to still-life, I only require them to be ‘metaphorical’ material. I install them, as it were, into an inner space, either increasing the tension or weakening of the energy of this space. Nothing happens on the surface of the canvas, everything is inside, and this inner space itself becomes the main content.

Attraction

Sergei Maslov once described me in one of his ironic texts: ‘Elena Vorobyeva paints, as it were, on behalf of a dull housewife. The models for her work are ordinary teapots, forks, husband (?), But she draws them with improvised means – fingers, used tights, knives. In doing so, everything turns out to be masterful, just as if a great kung fu master worked before us.’

It is clear that the key to this is two times repeated. Our mutual attraction-repulsion was based on a different understanding of art. Sergei was still the continuer of the avant-garde line, it was not without reason that he called himself ‘the last of the avant-garde’, but he heavily relied on literary, narrative positions in his work (like many Russian artists). I also wanted (perhaps, naively) not so much as to break the thread of tradition but to be out of tradition. But I will not dissemble and say that I reject the influence of such masters of the 1920s-30s as David Shterenberg. Or of Mitrokhin, of whose work I am also very fond.[David Shterenberg (1881 – 1948) studied art in Odessa, then in Paris (1906-12), not settling back in Russia until after 1917. He was involved with Jewish artists’ groups, and in 1918-20 he became Head of the Fine Art Department of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, which he set up in the Moscow InKhuK (Institute of Artistic Culture). From 1920-30 he taught at the Higher Institute of Photography and Phototechniques (1919–23) and at the VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN (1924–31) art school in Moscow. He was primarily a painter who used very simplified forms in his work. From 1930 he fell out of official favour. Dmitry Mitrokhin (1883 – 1973) studied book illustration at the Moscow State Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts. He was a book illustrator and curator of prints at the Russian Museum, Leningrad. He taught at the Higher Institute of Photography and Phototechnique, Moscow (1919–23) and at the VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN (1924–31).] Someone will find it strange and ridiculous, in our time, when postmodernism is no longer relevant, to seriously recall and refer to the art of the 1920s, but for me the important thing here is not even a formal plastic line, but the attitude of these artists to art, to the process of exploring the world. And this is not a world of global ideas and abstract concepts, but an intimate, close-to-a-person, everyday space. Roughly speaking, the artist-researcher once again ‘privatizes’ it, ‘digests’ it and gives it out in the form of an artefact, endowing it with the properties of an ideal world, that is, the profane turns into the divine. All that for all this.

Among our contemporaries, there are not many masters capable of truly exalting the most basic aspects of life. Perhaps, after all, Boris Mikhailov (in his Soviet period especially) could make art from ‘emptiness’, from what was available, adding or subtracting nothing, placing only accents. Ilya Kabakov, a master of the ‘domestic genre, also ploughed this virgin soil, but he did not ‘kick and fix’ like Mikhailov, but prepared everyday situations, writing, incidentally, his own stories, illustrating his household surroundings. He is a conceptualist, however …[Boris Mikhailov (born 1938 in Kharkiv) a self-taught photographer and artist who not only recorded the life and spirit of the decaying Soviet empire but also dispassionately showed the birth of its new neo-liberal successor. Ilya Kabakov (born 1933 in Dneipropetrovsk) starting as a children’s book illustrator and non-official artist in the 1950s, he became, during the 1960s, a leading member of the Sretensky Boulevard group which, during the 1970s, became known as the Moscow Conceptualists. He cast a laconic eye on late soviet life by focusing on individual fantasy and desire and comparing this with reality. In 1988 he emigrated from the USSR and settled eventually in the USA.]

The return will follow

Most of my paintings were painted between 1990 and 1994. At this time I also had an intense association with Lidya Blinova (the wife of Rustam Khalfin). Insanely talented, full of ideas, she attracted many people. Probably, she lacked unconditional faith in herself and was unable to realize all the ideas that were in her sketches and texts. Still, “poetry must be silly”, and Lidya was clever … She detected a sensual rather than an intellectual component in my paintings.

One day, after a trip to Moscow, she brought along two thick magazines and handed them to me for study. These were the first numbers of the journal edited by Viktor Misiano[Viktor Misiano (born 1957 in Moscow) curator of contemporary art at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts 1980-90, director of the Centre for Contemporary Art Moscow 1992-97. From 1993 he was the founder and editor-in-chief of the Moscow Art Magazine. Currently he is a freelance curator and writer.
Marat Guelman (born 1960 in Kishinev) Russian gallerist, collector and op-ed columnist; Oleg Kulik (born 1961 in Kiev) performance artist, sculptor, photographer and curator; Alexander Brener (b. 1957 in Alma-Ata), performance artist and self-described activist, with Kulik a main figure of Moscow Actionism in the 1990s.

I never encountered more indigestible reading. It seemed funny and I wanted more. We had heard rumours of the tumultuous artistic life in Moscow, and we decided to go there to find Viktor. On the proceeds from the sale of paintings (from my first solo exhibition) I bought tickets for the morning plane and by that afternoon I was walking through Yakimanka.

Moscow in the 1990s wasn’t for the faint-hearted. It seemed that all the open spaces were filled by bonfires, bums and beggars, while the city centre was constantly bustling with incessant political demonstrations. People in camouflage, garbage, beggars, flea markets, and malfeasance, bordering on the verge of a complete breakdown. It was a feast in a time of plague…

Only Lenin in his Mausoleum appeared to be calm, warm and cozy.

Meanwhile, the art scene, not unlike other aspects of life at the time, was bubbling. In the CCA (Center for Contemporary Art) – the Hamburg project Misiano, Guelman – Kulik with Compromise, in the apartment-gallery XL – Brener, sweaty and naked with a tape recorder on his neck, like a martyr, standing motionless above the crowd, eager for revelations. Rustam Khalfin also had an exhibition in Gallery 20 – several paintings with ‘hollow-holes’ [puloty]. I remember Brener’s remark: ‘Rustam, this is just a good painting …’

A week before our departure, we already had a firm understanding, that we must return. That, in order to say something, you have to live your life, and that this, in this situation, is already being lived and spoken about by others.

Wordplay incubator

Our first installations appeared as ironic materializations of the characters depicted in our art. Kettles, lamps, forks poured out from the canvas into the light of God to adopt their real appearance. In a magical way, they became objects of art, vessels for new meanings. I wanted to place the serious viewer in a blind alley – what makes this stupid teapot significant in the territory of art? What possible import could it have? So, these were the installations ‘Light at the end’, ‘Wordplay Incubator’, ‘Evolution – Revolution’, ‘Artist asleep’.

At the same time, I started writing small texts to clarify (and, possibly, to confuse the situation). The literary space had become a field of reflection for me. I described the story of the creation of one of the installations in a text written in 1999.

Now, the installation has become one of mine and Viktor’s [my husband] forms of expression. But the components of our work are no longer real objects, but photographs and video. What do they represent? You may ask. But yes, everything is about the same – the space close to a person, the sphere of habitation of everyone.

As for painting, I also love it, and periodically return to it – it is closer to my body. But now for me, the picture is not the only container of ‘art’.

For that I am very glad.

– Elena Vorobyeva