AbstractAs Kazakhstan, the largest post-Soviet Central Asian republic, prepares to aban-don the Cyrillic alphabet in favor of Latin, it manifests the overall transitionalflow that the region attempts to follow with varying success over the last 25 years.While official accounts and personal histories diverge, art emerges as a litmus testof the two and half decades of change: social, cultural, and linguistic.
The chapter looks at art within a framework of its role as a medium of socialand political expression. In this context, artworks – their subject matter but alsothe media and style – become a form of language. This language in the context ofCentral Asia at different periods facilitated manifestation of personal opinions,official propaganda, or political dissent.
The roots of the Central Asian art world lay in the Soviet system of artproduction with its characteristic style and limited themes, its coarse criticism,and inventive underground. As a melting pot of cultures, the region became
A. de Tiesenhausen (*)Independent Scholar, London, UKe-mail: [email protected]
even more diverse during the Soviet period ensuring the constant exchangeof stereotypical and sensitive outside and inward gazes.
Fast-forward to the 1990s, a decade that changed everything, bringing bothhope and chaos, providing rich food for artistic production. New internationalexchanges brought new conversations with the outside world and with CentralAsian traditionalism. Understanding of what constitutes art education, criticism,and art itself was uprooted and questioned.
In the 2000s involvement with the international art scene at once both createdand destroyed the newly established and previously cocooned art world in theregion. Questions such as regionalism, traditionalism, antiestablishment, self-editing, and stereotype pleasing came to the fore. The internal art scene wasfirst in disarray and later in renewed form tears itself between the decorative andactionist camps. Both sides are sliding toward Latinization of its forms while notquite sure yet how to transliterate its Cyrillic roots.
KeywordsSoviet · Post-Soviet · Central Asia · Orientalism · Nomad · Identity · Nationalism
Introduction
As Kazakhstan, the largest post-Soviet Central Asian republic, prepares to abandonthe Cyrillic alphabet in favor of Latin, it manifests the overall transitional flow thatthe region attempts to follow with varying success over the last 25 years. Whileofficial accounts and personal histories diverge, art emerges as a litmus test of thetwo and half decades of change: social, cultural, and linguistic.
The chapter looks at art within a framework of its role as a medium of social andpolitical expression. In this context, artworks – their subject matter but also themedia and style – become a form of language. This language in the context ofCentral Asia at different periods facilitated manifestation of personal opinions,official propaganda, or political dissent.
The roots of the Central Asian art world lay in the Soviet system of art productionwith its characteristic style and limited themes, its coarse criticism, and its inventiveunderground. As a melting pot of cultures, the region became even more diverseduring the Soviet period ensuring the constant exchange of stereotypical and sensi-tive outside and inward gazes.
Fast-forward to the 1990s, a decade that changed everything, bringing both hopeand chaos, providing rich food for artistic production. New international exchangesbrought new conversations with the outside world and with Central Asian tradition-alism. Understanding of what constitutes art education, criticism, and art itself wasuprooted and questioned.
In the 2000s involvement with the international art scene at once both created anddestroyed the newly established and previously cocooned art world in the region.Questions such as regionalism, traditionalism, anti-establishment, self-editing andstereotype pleasing came to the fore. The internal art scene was first in disarray and
2 A. de Tiesenhausen
later in renewed form tears itself between the decorative and actionist camps. Bothsides are sliding toward Latinization of its forms while not quite sure yet how totransliterate its Cyrillic roots.
Cultural Background
Central Asia is a vast territory stretching between the Black Sea and China west toeast and between Russia and India north and south. For the purposes of this essay,Central Asia denotes the former Soviet republics and Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, andKyrgyzstan, which were all part of the USSR and gained independence in 1991.
A recent exhibition, “Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia,” which was ondisplay from 14 September 2017 to 14 January 2018, at the British Museum,London, brought attention to a culture previously little known in Britain and theWest. Most of the exhibits came from the Hermitage Museum in Russia, and acouple were from the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan. In fact, inKazakhstan, Scythians are not only well known but are also seen as great ancestors.This discrepancy of known/unknown characterizes the nature of informationexchange, or lack of it, between Central Asia and the outside world. However,when information reaches the outside public, it is received with a great deal ofsurprise and fascination. Fascination can become a perilous territory where theborder between exoticism and genuine interest is easily blurred.
Central Asian visual heritage includes Bronze Age petroglyphs, Scythian animal-istic design, Islamic architecture of the Middle Ages, and a very diverse variety oftextile and carpet making, as well as jewelry. However, a form of taught andexhibited fine art arrived in Central Asia only at the beginning of the twentiethcentury with the establishment of Soviet power.
Creation of Art Collections and Art History
The first galleries in the region were created between 1918 and the 1930s withcollections based on transfers from museums in Russia. The first art museum inCentral Asia opened in 1918 in Tashkent. It was based on a private collection ofRussian and Western art and was soon supplemented by a number of handovers.Thus, the basis for the Central Asian fine art museum collections, which provided avaluable educational resource for future local artists, was a predominantly realist artof the nineteenth century (Nikiforova 1975). Furthermore, in the 1930s museumsreceived art of the earlier periods – such as Russian Orthodox icons. The museum inTashkent received 34 icons from a museum in Ryazan, Russia (Nikiforova 1975).However, some transfers that came at a later stage were quite different.
In 1936 several works from the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow came into thecollection of what is now the State Museum of Art of the Republic of Kazakhstannamed after A. Kasteev in Almaty. One of the works was the Abstract Composition,1910, by Olga Rozanova, a major representative of Russian avant-garde (Djadaibaev
Speaking the Language of Art in Central Asia: Old Archives and New. . . 3
et al. 2001). It is very curious that at a time when the entire country was entering aperiod of heavy political purges and tightening the limits of artistic expression, thisabstract work was sent as one of masterpieces to start a collection in the capital of aSoviet Republic. At the same time, geographical remoteness of Central Asia fromRussian centers of power allowed a certain amount of freedom of choice to museumcurators. The museum in Kazakhstan carried out an extensive amount of acquisitionsfrom collectors, friends, or families of artists which were often seen as undesirableby officials in Moscow or Leningrad – such as Nathan Altman, Pavel Filonov, andZinaida Serebriakova (Kim 2008).
Collections were soon supplemented with works by Russian artists born inCentral Asia or who came from Russia. They were arriving for two main reasons:to document the extensive industrial and social changes that Soviet authoritieswanted to see and to teach local artists. Some of the most notable representativeswere Pavel Benkov and Alexander Volkov in Uzbekistan and Semion Chuikov inKyrgyzstan. In Benkov’s famous work, Girlfriends (1940) (oil on canvas,120 cm � 150 cm in the State Museum of Arts of Uzbekistan, Tashkent), twogirls are seen admiring a rich harvest of grapes in a lush sun-drenched vinery. Thetwo friends are of visibly different ethnic origin – one has darker skin and long blackhair and is wearing traditional Uzbek clothes, while the other has lighter skin, shortblond hair, and a modern dress. The picture has a sort of impressionist feel to it in theway that the paint is applied to the canvas and the light is given an almost immediatevisual status. However, the subject matter is politically charged on two levels: onedepicting high yields from agricultural production and another the multiethnicfriendship across the Soviet Union.
Soviet Period: Between Propaganda and Orientalism
Alexander Volkov’s multiple works of the late 1920s and 1930s depicting the cottonharvest also speak of agriculture and production. However, both his painting styleand the way the subject matter was treated went outside the strict Socialist Realistframework. His works have a monumental feel about them, similar at once to thefather of modernism Paul Cezanne, and at some point communist artist hero DiegoRivera. His subjects, although gathering impressive harvests of cotton, do notembody the enthusiasm typical for Soviet paintings. While Benkov’s sun shimmersthrough the dense foliage, Vokov’s sun is only suggested in the burnt skin of theworkers and the weariness expressed on their faces and bodies.
Semion Chuikov’s most famous work is A Daughter of Soviet Kyrgyzia (1948)(oil on canvas, 119 cm� 94 cm, the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow). The paintingis a portrait of a Kyrgyz girl walking proudly toward an unseen goal. She is clutchingbooks in her left hand. This work made an opposite journey to the transfer made adecade ago; it went to the State Tretyakov Gallery. It was also widely disseminatedacross the Soviet Union, printed in school textbooks, and became well known toseveral generations of soviet children. It is an image of emancipation, talking aboutprogress in education. It is also a work that plays as a metaphor for the entire nation
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or even region: Central Asia as a young emancipated girl on the road to knowledgeand freedom.
These three artists were among the first art teachers in Central Asia. Local artistswere also sent to art institutes in Russia to train. They would return to continue theSoviet art mission to educate and illustrate the changing realities. For some, theirown realities were going though transformation. Ural Tansykbaev, an ethnic Kazakhwho worked in Uzbekistan, is one such example. His early works include a well-known Crimson Autumn (1931) (oil on canvas, 118.5 cm � 105 cm, theKarakalpakstan State Museum of Art named after IV Savitsky, Nukus). It is onceagain an image of the heat; even if the tight landscape is filled with autumn colors,there is a sense that the man and his blue donkey are having a brief but well-deservedrespite. Flat areas of bright color are similar to Fauvist experiments. The same artisttwo decades later painted wide realistic landscapes filled with joyous people andelectricity. It is a transformation from artistic experimentation to painting by order.The Soviet art system was based on state orders and where painters had a set ofsubjects that they could depict; success in these meant the artist’s works would bebought and he/she would have a studio to work in as well as the materials needed.
Art, together with film, literature, photography, and theatre, was seen as one of themain vehicles for dissemination of information within and outside the Soviet Union.While the early years after the Russian revolution were filled with experiment andavant-garde movements, in 1932 Socialist Realism became the only acceptable styleto work in. It was characterized by a realist painting manner and highly positivesocialist messages, all associated with the Soviet propaganda machine. One famousphrase sums up the output that was supposed to be created all over the Soviet Union:national in form, socialist in content. “Form” in this case did not imply style ormaterial but an ornamental and visual accent seemingly national, for example, arecognizable Kazakh landscape and Uzbek facial features in oil paintings or use ofKyrgyz decorative motif on otherwise neoclassical architecture. Socialist contentmeant that Central Asian art, just as that from other Soviet republics, portrayed rapidand successful industrial and agricultural advancement and social changes includingthe emancipation of women and intra-ethnic friendship.
Just as Russian was becoming a lingua franca across the Soviet Union, SocialistRealism became the visual common language. The main themes, as mentionedabove, were characterized by the notion of success and progress. The perpetualpositivity presented a skewed image of reality, which was desired by the state. Oneof its facets, which particularly affected Central Asia, was that of orientalism, not inits European incarnation of odalisques in harems, but as a mode of depicting SovietEast as the Soviet Russia’s Other.
This form of Soviet Orientalism brought about the creation of a stereotypicalimage of Central Asians and affected the creation of identities within the region(Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen 2016). Soon, local artists were conforming to the gener-ally accepted norms of depicting Central Asia, including vast empty fields, richharvests, liberated women at work, educated children, especially girls, and massivebuilding sites. Art works were exhibited in Moscow at All-Union exhibitions, whileat the same time paintings executed by artists in the Soviet center presented a
Speaking the Language of Art in Central Asia: Old Archives and New. . . 5
multiethnic Soviet population marching towards the utopian socialist future lead bywhite men.
By this double helping of visual information, the consensus was formed thatwhite Russian men were leading the progressive change both in Russia and acrossthe so-called peripheries of the Soviet state. The Russian language was seen as amore advanced form of communication – as a form of access to both well-knownexamples of Russian literature and to translations of world literature and scientificand technical texts.
Between Stalin and Independence
Following the death of Stalin and general lessening of the state control over arts,artists in Central Asia began some experimentation with both style and content.Using expressive techniques or tentatively approaching national histories became aform of limited liberation.
One of the first women artists of Kazakhstan, Aisha Galimbaeva, often portrayedwomen in national dress, sometimes in traditional settings, at others in somewhatmore decorative format. She created a multilayered work, A Guest from the VirginLand (1961) (oil on canvas, 100 cm� 150 cm, State Museum of Arts of the Republicof Kazakhstan named after A. Kasteev, Almaty). The composition includes twowomen, one older, one younger, having tea by a window. The older woman iswearing a traditional dress including a head covering. The younger woman iswearing a bright red shirt with a medal on it. They are drinking tea from a traditionalsamovar and teapot with typically large apples, associated with southern Kazakh-stan, scattered around the table. Outside the window are signs of modern architectureand transport. The two women are smiling at each other. This is an image ofexchange between the old and new. The context is the massive agricultural exper-iment, viz., the Virgin Lands in the north of Kazakhstan that were cleared for wheatproduction and involved a large-scale migration of workers from Russia. In thepaintings, all of this information is omitted and the only reference is in the title of thework. The younger woman’s happy face suggests the success of the mission, and themedal underlines her personal achievements. However, inclusion of the traits oftradition and the strong sense of being in Kazakhstan underline the artist’s pride inher own and the country’s roots.
By the 1970s artists such as Zhanatay Shardenov were experimenting withlandscapes, notably mountains, that are almost un-Soviet or more precisely notpolitical. The manner of use of paint – heavy impasto, swirls – reminded one ofVincent van Gogh. His contemporaries, Abdrashit Sydykhanov and MakumKisamedinov, also put to test other existing artistic styles such as expressionismand abstraction. In their works, such as Kisamedinov’s Hate (1973) (oil on canvaslaid on carton, 50 cm � 70 cm, National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan,Astana), it has an expression on faces that has often become associated with gloom,even with a hint of madness. These changes all pointed to transformations that werewell on their way.
6 A. de Tiesenhausen
New Freedoms
By the time of perestroika (restructuring) in the 1980s, there was a general sense ofrevolution. Artists began exploring pre-Socialist Realist avant-garde as well asobtaining a wider knowledge of Western art. This period led to formation of urbanyouth movements such as Green Triangle and on the other side more matureclassically trained artists and architects who began venturing into installation andperformance including another colorfully named group, Red Tractor. Green Trianglegroup’s view was a mixture of hippie lifestyle, rock music, unconventional dress,and all-encompassing creativity – where any art had value as long as it was notofficial art – and included underground art and folklore. Red Tractor (Kyzyl Traktor)group’s performances appropriated the image and stereotype of nomadic culture,shamanism, and ritual – mixing postmodern irony with modernist desire for originaland exotic. While at the height of Socialist Realism, artists were often moving intoother creative industries, such as book illustration and publishing in order to survive.By the late 1980s and 1990s, the movement was reversed.
This change also affected art criticism. Valeria Ibraeva, editor-in-chief of the artmagazine, Oner, became the director of the only Soros Centre for Contemporary Artin Central Asia in Almaty. She curated numerous shows at home and abroad,following the closure of the Centre in 2008; her career focuses on curating and artcriticism.
During the Soviet period, official and unofficial art were two parallel realities, onevisible and one concealed, which sometimes intersected. By the 1990s the twostrands started to diverge in an open conflict. As the newly discovered independencemeant that nation building was on the agenda, monuments of national heroes startedto appear across the squares of the country. At the same time, the eruption ofexhibition spaces and artistic freedoms meant that previously unofficial art wasgaining its visible platform and also public attention increased with new criticalwriting and added attention of the mass media. The mass media was, understandably,not sympathetic; the change between old art and new was drastic. Within a decade,artists across Central Asia had accumulated enough material and knowledge toexperiment with all major styles created in the West during the twentieth century(Ibraeva 2014).
In 1999 the Soros Center organized the exhibition, “Self-Identity: FuturologicalPrognosis,” which announced the establishment of a new language of art. It includedan ironic conceptualism of Sergei Maslov and his love letters to Whitney Huston;pseudo-shamanistic installation and performances by Said Atabekov, SmailBayaliev, and Moldakul Narymbetov; and discovered material collections byGeorgy Tryakin Bukharov, Rustam Khalfin, and many others (Ibraeva 1999).
In 2000 Soros sponsored a publication of articles by 15 main art historians at thetime on the state of the art in Kazakhstan (Ibraeva and Malinovskaya 2000). The artworld became so active and varied that in 2002 the Soros Centre published adirectory of artists, critics, curators, galleries, and art centers in the country (Ibraeva2002). The art scene was booming and international relationships were on the rise.While during the 1990s Western diplomats and businessmen coming to the region
Speaking the Language of Art in Central Asia: Old Archives and New. . . 7
were the main contacts for Central Asian artists with the outside world, by the early2000s, the exchange moved over the borders.
Central Asia’s Dip into International Waters
In 2005 the first Central Asian pavilion at the Venice Biennale brought the region tothe international art scene, thereby gaining widespread recognition. However, whileabroad artists were finding that their experiments were easily understood, at homethe language of official art continued to be classical. The art scene diverged into twodirections: one could be described as “decorative” art; the other has been known as“current” or “actual” art. Decorative art is characterized by use of classical materials,such as oil painting and sculpture, and limited use of themes (especially proclama-tion of national Golden Age) with strong warrior male characters and beautifulyoung females. The actual art utilized varying media from video and photographyto performance and installation. The subject matter reflected the personal and socialchanges that were taking place at increasing speed.
The Venice Biennale pavilion was entitled “Art from Central Asia: A Contem-porary Archive.” It was curated by Viktor Misiano, a Russian curator, and organizedby the Kurama Art gallery based in Kyrgyzstan. The pavilion included works byartists from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. The exhibition and theaccompanying catalogue did become a form of archive, not only of the post-Sovietor contemporary situation but also of the development of art in Central Asia fromthe early twentieth century. This region, never before represented at Venice,needed a good introduction, which the catalogue provided in full (Djaparov andMisiano 2005).
While the exhibit brought together the concise history of art in the region, it alsobrought to the foreground several artists whose works define Central Asian art to thepresent day. These are Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djoumaliev from Kyr-gyzstan, Almagul Menlibayeva and Yerbossyn Meldibekov from Kazakhstan, andVyacheslav Akhunov from Uzbekistan.
At the Biennale, a married couple, Kasmalieva and Djoumaliev, presented avideo installation called Trans Siberian Amazons, 2004, which documents thetravels of small-scale traders and their songs which were popular in their Sovietyouth. The video, which is available at http://aspangallery.com/en/exhibition/contemporarynomadism (as of May 15, 2018), is set into an installation made outof typical checkered sacks that are often used by sellers to carry their goods. Itpresents a thought-provoking rendering of the change of political and economicsituations but also opens up the borders of what borders are, both technically andthematically. The artist duo had their first solo show in Central Asia in 2017 at theAspan Gallery in Almaty. This gallery opened in 2014 and has been steadilyorganizing retrospective exhibitions of the artists who took part in the VeniceBiennale in 2005. Kasmalieva and Djoumaliev presented some of the more recentworks, including a video documenting illegal Central Asian migrants living inNew York, as well as photographs of the eternal Silk Road, this time following the
lives of people who work along the roads between China and Kyrgyzstan mostlyproviding services to truck drivers.
Yerbossyn Meldibekov was an artist with an already established reputation by thetime of the first Central Asian pavilion. He has cultivated an image of himself as anartist-barbarian. His images are often about war and conflict but in a strongly ironicand self-deprecating manner. From his typically Uzbek ceramic plates printed withimages of heavy armament pulled by camels to sheep’s teeth sticking out of hismouth for Alien (Fig. 1), he is playing with the recognizable language of stereotypesand presents to the West an image that it expects, only to question these expectations.
Almagul Menlibayeva is another artist who plays with stereotypes. She is mostconcerned with women’s rights and the environment. Menlibayeva at the moment isthe most successful Central Asian artist in the West and at the same time is activelyinvolved in the cultural program created by the Kazakhstan government, RuhaniZhangyru, to modernize thinking. She is known for her mesmerizing videos andphotographs of women, naked or swathed in fabric, placed into various settings fromthe steppes to abandoned building sites to former nuclear test centers. Her worksfrom the Aral Beach series deal with both gender and environmental catastrophe. InFig. 2, a female model is posing as if in a fashion shoot, wearing a military style hat,with a background of rusty boats stranded in the middle of a salty steppe, all which isleft of the receding Aral Sea.
Artists of this generation approach art as a form of direct connection to theaudience which may otherwise not find similar views in the press or publications.The audience may be Central Asian or international. However, the use of a widely
Fig. 1 YerbossynMeldibekov, Alien, 2008. Thesheep’s teeth sticking out ofhis mouth represent therecognizable language ofstereotypes and present to theWest an image that it expects,only to question theseexpectations. (Digitalphotograph, 100 � 70 cm.Courtesy of the artist)
Speaking the Language of Art in Central Asia: Old Archives and New. . . 9
understandable language of contemporary art allows their messages to be not onlysocially challenging but also visually stimulating. While visual language of art hasbeen going through significant transformation, the actual linguistic situation hasbeen uneven.
New Nationalism: Old Identities
All Central Asian countries approached the question of language differently. Therewas a general idea that national languages should be in wider use, and indeed theybecame constitutional; however, Russian has remained in wide use, occupyingstrong positions in everyday communication in urban centers, dominating popularculture and in the media. In 2017 Kazakhstan’s government made a decision toabandon Cyrillic alphabet in favor of a Latin one. At the same time, Kazakhlanguage has seen a steady rise not only in rural areas, where it is the main languageof communication, but also in urban areas, strongly supported by the nationalistmovement.
Linguistic preference reveals one of the curious intersections between the nation-alists and the creative elites. There are divisions within the art field itself, as
mentioned previously, based on style and subject, but also it seems based on theattitude toward nationalism. While on the one side the intellectual and artistic milieuprides itself in left wing and liberal views, at the same time, the question ofnationalism is presented as a form of resistance to the Russian hegemony. Wherethe intellectuals despise nationalists’ views on Islam, nationalists despise the pro-gressive views on gender equality and gay rights. Both camps, however, seem toagree that language, national traditions, and ethnic origin are the cornerstones ofnational and personal identities allowing one to be more or less Kazakh.
Saule Suleimenova works closely with the notions of ethnicity and, in her recentseries, utilizes plastic bags as her material. Her “cellophane painting” Kelin, 2015(Fig. 3), derives from ethnographic photographs taken in Central Asia in thenineteenth century. The word Kelin means bride or daughter-in-law, and in recentyears, preceding the “me too”movement in the West, the image of a daughter-in-lawbecame a key battleground image between traditionalists and reformists. Thismember of the family is traditionally expected to be docile. Historically, bridal fateis associated with arranged marriages, stolen brides, and more generally the loss ofindependence and any rights. At the same time, Suleimenova’s Kelin is almost amother figure overlooking what is happening below. All of the “cellophane
Fig. 3 Saule Suleimenova,Kelin (Bride), 2015. Themother figure overlookssymbolizing both the bride’straditional fate of arrangedmarriage and loss ofindependence and, at the sametime, a contemporary lack ofcare for the environment.Plastic bags on polycarbonatesheets, 600 � 400 cm.(Courtesy of the artist)
Speaking the Language of Art in Central Asia: Old Archives and New. . . 11
paintings,” whether images of flowers or administrative buildings with nonsensicalqueues, are an expression of another frustration, the lack of care for the environment.
Identity remains one of the most important defining issues for Central Asiancontemporary art. Both within the region and on the international scene, there is atonce a lack of consensus on what that identity is and a new interest in stepping awayfrom regional or national identities in favor of more globally potent themes of genderequality and environmental protection. In this way, the desire to move to the Latinalphabet is just an expression of the desire to fit in with the wider world which isdefined by American popular culture and European history and values.
Back to the Future
A new generation of artists is taking a stance that directly questions the disappear-ance or reconstruction of identities, with a clear criticism of globalization associatedwith a loss of roots. In Gulnur Mukazhanova’s straightforwardly named Transfor-mation of traditional values during globalisation, 2013 (Fig. 4), we observe facescoming out of a felt mass, merging into a unified whole. The material has strongassociations with nomadic culture; felt is a traditional material to make a yurt(nomadic dwelling), as well as rugs and clothes.
Fig. 4 Gulnur Mukazhanova,Transformation of traditionalvalues during Globalisation,2013. Questioning identity ina global world. Installationseries 3, sheep-wool, mixedmedia, 320 � 200 cm.(Courtesy of the artist)
12 A. de Tiesenhausen
Syrlybek Bekbotaev, in his piece, Happiness, 2017 (Fig. 5), deconstructs one ofthe seminal works of the twentieth-century art of Kazakhstan and paints its copy ontoa rotating mechanism resembling a clock and lets it tick along. There is almost anexpectation that at some point, all will come together, and we will see the originalimage, but it never does.
Art in Central Asia is a form of language of communication across the region andwith the outside world. While in Soviet times it served as an official propagandamachine, in post-Soviet era, artists discovered one new language after another inorder to experiment with boundaries of personal and political expression. Identitieshave been shaped and reshaped by and in art. It seems the latest generation issomewhat skeptical at the possibility of ever finding a one-fits-all cure and iswelcoming the brave new world of post-truth and post-identity.
Both established artists and the younger generation are searching for new plat-forms to show their art and be heard. In 2017–2018, Central Asian artists’ works arebeing shown in locations as diverse as Singapore, Yinchuan (China), Charleroi(Belgium), Gangwon (South Korea), Sharjah (United Arab Emirates), St Petersburg(Russia), Berlin (Germany), New York (the Unites States), Seoul (South Korea), andLondon (the United Kingdom) (see http://aspangallery.com/en/news, accessed June3, 2018). There is a notable desire by artists to be viewed as individuals, and less
Fig. 5 Syrlybek Bekbotayev,Happiness, from the seriesModernist Paradigm, 2017.The artist may be hinting thattime transforms nationalidentity, where it is stillrecognizable, but as a form ofa moving collage. Metal,wood, paint. National EXPOPavilion, Astana, Kazakhstan.(Courtesy of the artist)
Speaking the Language of Art in Central Asia: Old Archives and New. . . 13
importance is placed on collective identities – and therefore collective exhibitions.At the same time, the international art world with its ever-widening geographicalscope presents new opportunities and examples of significance of art in internationalrelations. Central Asian governments as well as individual artists may be weary offollowing an exclusivelyWestern or Eastern route, but it seems there is no longer anyneed to do so. In fact, every prize, exhibition, and publication that the artist entersallows her/him access to new encounters – with collectors, critics, and other artists –which in turn establishes a firmer image of Central Asian art abroad and may lead tocreation of regional or international art events located in Central Asia. This devel-opment seems to be one of the main topics for the future, viz., the possibility of bothwider public, officials and younger aspiring artists to access high-quality and diverseart at home. Just as languages develop over time, the art world requires both internaland external stimuli in order to remain an active force in reflecting and engaging incontemporary reality.
References
Abykayeva-Tiesenhausen, A. (2016). Central Asia in Art: From Soviet Orientalism to the NewRepublics. London: I. B. Tauris.
Djadaibaev, A., Mukazhanova, K., & Kosenko, V. (Eds.). (2001). State Museum of Art of theRepublic of Kazakhstan. A Guidebook. Almaty: Kaprint.
Djaparov, U., & Misiano, V. (Eds.). (2005). Art from Central Asia: a Contemporary Archive,catalogue of Central Asia Pavilion at 51 Venice Biennale. Bishkek: Kurama Art.
Ibraeva, V. (Ed.). (1999). Self-identity: Futurological prognosis. Almaty: Soros Centre for Con-temporary Art.
Ibraeva, V. (Ed.). (2002). Contemporary art of Kazakhstan. A directory. Almaty: Soros Centre forContemporary Art.
Ibraeva, V. (2014). Art of Kazakhstan: Post-Soviet period. Almaty: Tonkaya Gran.Ibraeva, V., & Malinovskaya, E. (Eds.). (2000). Contemporary writing on Contemporary art: A
collection of essays on contemporary art. Almaty: Association of Art Historians.Kim, E. (2008). The Collection of the Kasteev State Museum of Arts. In Treasures of Kazakhstan.
London: Christie’s.Nikiforova, E. (Ed.). (1975). Art Museum of the Uzbek SSR. Painting. Leningrad: Aurora Art
