The strong presence of Central Asian artists at recent art fairs and exhibits in New York is helping to underscore the fact that the region has joined the mainstream of the international art market.
A special exhibition titled Given Difference at the Asian contemporary art fair in New York in November featured six artists from Kazakhstan, Georgia and Turkey. Kazakhstan was represented by two rising stars of the Central Asian art world -- Erbossyn Meldibekov and Almagul Menlibayeva. Exhibition organizers suggested the two artists' work opened "space for anxious reflection."
Almagul Menlibayeva's works attempt to distill traditional practices, ideas and imagery into a contemporary art form. Often described as punk-shamanism, Menlibayeva's videos are theatrical and laden with complex references -- from tribal symbolism to images of the communist industrial past.
One of Menlibayeva's videos shown at the New York art fair -- Headcharge -- is a story that casually begins in a restaurant in the city of Almaty and gradually slips into a disturbing ritual performed by the female protagonists. The video shows several urban young women eating a sheep's head and feeding each other, thereby underscoring the juxtaposition of traditional nomadic beliefs with today's urban lifestyle. Step by step, the film gives way to a parallel reality, referring to shamanistic travels between worlds.
Born and raised in Kazakhstan, Menlibayeva currently lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam. Art curators say she often depicts the cultural and spiritual traditions of her native country as erotic and strongly feminine dream sequences.
Menlibayeva's second film, Kissing Totems, is a surrealistic journey inspired by her childhood memory of walking past Soviet factories, seeking the help of a shaman to cure her mother's severe illness. With what seems to be the clear influence of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's enigmatic style (particularly the bleak interiors of Stalker), the split-screen video follows a girl, accompanied by her mother, entering an abandoned industrial complex filled with birds. The video then takes a surreal turn when she encounters female-like creatures, called peris.
The other Kazakh artist presented at the Asian art fair, Meldibekov, explores the question of belonging, but through a different prism. His series Family Album (made together with his brother Nurbossyn Oris) are historic photographs of groups of ordinary people -- families or friends -- posing in front of a public sculpture of their country's leaders. Each old picture shot during the Soviet period is matched by a newer one of the same people at the same spot but with a different sculpture behind them -- a change in the figure with whom they are associated, determined by the state and history.
Meldibekov looks at the figure of the leader as fetishized by ordinary citizens. He also shows people as if both empowered by virtue of proximity to the great leader and the due diligence of paying homage to him.
Meldibekov has recently begun a series entitled Peak Communism which was also featured at the New York Asian Art Fair. The artist inverts cheap metal pots and bowls and moulds their tops to show their shapes as different shapes -- such as Communism Peak, Lenin Peak and Peak of the Pioneer -- offering a pathetic specter of a government projecting itself as a noble vision of the nation-state. Either way the series Peak Communism is viewed, the work appears as hollow or empty shells, little more than commonplace, disposable icons. By transforming the most mundane and cheap product of everyday use into a symbol of state ideology, Meldibekov provides us with an ironic view of the building of the modern state. The pathetic sight of these up-ended utensils bespeaks of the impoverishment of life -- a condition of the shaping of a people and way of life by the imposition of a ruling ideological belief that of itself is no more than an empty form.
Elsewhere, an exhibition of Kyrgyz artists Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, entitled A New Silk Road, is on display these days at the Winkleman Gallery in New York City. The show runs through January 10. A series of photo images and a 5-channel video, shot along the highways and small villages connecting China through Kyrgyzstan to Europe, capture the determination and resourcefulness that define this mountainous and economically impoverished region and provide snapshots of how local and global economics are intertwined.
The video, subtitled Algorithm of Survival and Hope, presents a nearly hypnotic panorama of exquisitely edited scenes picturing the dilapidated Soviet trucks (that keep breaking down as they haul carriages of scrap metal from Central Asia to China) against the caravan of shiny, behemoth Chinese 18-wheelers barreling through the narrow passes filled with cheaply manufactured goods destined for former Soviet markets and Europe. Along the way, the residents of Kyrgyz farms and tiny towns exhibit stunning entrepreneurial ingenuity in finding ways to bond with and benefit from the drivers of both sets of trucks.
This work was commissioned to the Kyrgyz artists in 2007 by the Art Institute of Chicago. As Lisa Dorin, assistant curator of the Institute's Department of Contemporary Art, wrote in her essay on the commission "The five-channel video installation provides an abstract set of instruction for resilience in the face of hardship." The central messages of A New Silk Road take on a wider poignancy as the entire world begins to reel from a global economic crisis that seems to know no boundaries.
Editor's note:
Nadira Artyk is a freelance journalist based in New York.
