On language of supremacy: Medina Bazargali in conversation
by Saltanat Shoshanova & Annika Terwey
25th October 2019
Medina Bazargali is a contemporary artist from Kazakhstan, based in Moscow. She is fond of ironic and exaggerated realism in which the internet, new technologies and (post) totalitarian realities intermingle. Soviet stiffness, the digital revolution and the revival of national identity go together like a 3-in-1 product sold at the supermarket. Through her artworks, she wishes to find a sustainable frequency of oscillation between these three poles.
Saltanat Shoshanova
You are considered to be a part of a new generation of contemporary Kazakhstani artists. How do you connect to the artists’ generation of your parents (Saule Suleimenova and Kuanysh Bazargaliyev) and the generation before them (like Rustam Halfin or Olga Blinova for example)? Do you think that the questions that you are asking now differ from their questions? Do you feel that the struggle has changed?
Medina Bazargali
The first generation of contemporary artists in Kazakhstan began to appear on the scene in the early ‘90s, so most of them spent a big part of their lives in informational isolation. The Soviet standard rigidly and successfully promoted social realism as the only way of artistic development. When the Soviet Union collapsed, artists gained more freedom and power and the dawn of the free Kazakh contemporary art began. I respect their experience and it seems to me that both of our generations have struggled with rotten systems. However, I don't think the questions we ask are the same. My generation - so-called generation Z - I think, is the first generation in the post-Soviet space that overcame stagnation and depression. We do not look around in fear when we speak openly about issues like colonization, for example.We can be abrupt and bold because we don't have the post-Soviet traumatic syndrome anymore.
Saltanat Shoshanova
So would you say, the way is free now?
Medina Bazargali
Kazakhstan, with its quasi-democratic political system, the quasi-market economy is still deeply mixed with the residues of the Soviet ideology. I consider those residues to be radioactive material that should be liquidated and I hope to become one of the liquidators. I don’t want to necessarily develop a new Kazakh identity, but my wish is to emancipate it from fear of the great lord, who or whatever it may be, to release it from pain after multiple trauma, to help it accept its true history and true customs, not mixed with stereotypes and political myths.
Annika Ernst Terwey
You mentioned the topic of colonization, which you actually address in several artworks. For example, in your video Decolonization of Kurt (2018), you documented the process of colonization of Kurt - a traditional Kazakh dry cheese - by mold. In the second part of the video, you try to detach the visible parts of the superficial mold, which cannot be erased completely. What does the decolonial project consist of for you?
Medina Bazargali
The topic of decolonization is very popular and controversial in the Kazakh art community today. In the video, I metaphorically depicted radioactive residues of the great modern project of the Soviet Union by using a mold that slowly colonized kurt. The main idea lies in the impossibility of total erasure of this mold. Mold toxins are too strong, so even if they are not visible, they can easily reappear. Hence, the words appearing in the final scene - “Decolonization failed. Fatal error”. Those radioactive residues can be found not only in Kazakhstan but in Russia as well. Now when I live in Moscow, the very heart of the colonial power, I feel it even more intensely.
Annika Ernst Terwey
How does this manifest itself?
Medina Bazargali
Seeing migrant workers from Central Asia made me rethink my own privileges. Even though I as well faced multiple nationalist acts towards myself, for example from neighbours. Here, in Moscow, you hear a swear-word churka, which is basically similar to the n-word, everywhere from the university to a grocery shop. A recent very upsetting story: A Kazakh guy walked into an Irish pub and the employees called him Liu Kang and played the Mortal Combat theme song. He complained but they refused to see anything discriminatory in their actions. Some ethnic minorities here do not complain at all when something similar happens. They even reinforce this language of supremacy by finding it funny.
Saltanat Shoshanova
Is it important for you to be understood by the Western audience as well, or do you imagine your audience to be the one that understands the local artistic and aesthetic language that you use?
Medina Bazargali
I don’t want to be exoticized and exoticize myself in favor of the Western audience. Although the attitude of some Western curators and researchers towards the Kazakh art scene has changed a lot since the 90s when they were looking for "exotic" art, the demands for it are still present and some local artists allow themselves to be exoticized in favour of the audience. That upsets me. At the same time, in order to get to any Western institutions in the first place, one needs systematic support provided by governmental or any other institutions. There is this promising generation of artists, that get very little of that kind of support, so for them, it is almost impossible to survive by doing only art.
Saltanat Shoshanova
You are very politically active and openly feminist, which is still not commonplace amongst young women in Kazakhstan. Why it is so important for you to connect art and politics? Do you think that art can bring social change?
Medina Bazargali
I grew up in a community of artists and activists, who live and work shoulder to shoulder and with an idea that basic human rights should be an integral part of every society. Every artist, as a particularly sensitive social element, must understand and support this idea.
When a long-term president Nursultan Nazarbayev resigned, and the interim and current president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev announced the name change for the capital from Astana to Nur-Sultan, I simply could not stay silent. I made a video reciting a slogan: „Nursultan is not my city, Tokayev is not my president, Dariga is not my Speaker of the Senate of the Parliament, I have a choice.” The video gained more than 150.000 views and inspired so many other activists to stand up and say something. I continued my cyberactivism by creating and spreading Facebook frames and AR-masks that serve as protest posters on avatars and in Instagram stories.
Saltanat Shoshanova
How do your feminist beliefs influence your work?
Medina Bazargali
As a feminist, I am aware of my privileged position when compared to other female groups in Kazakhstan that are less protected and have fewer opportunities in life. In my artworks, I bring awareness to those feminist issues by placing them in exhibition spaces.
For example, my artwork from 2018 titled Talaq is dedicated to one-third of Kazakh women who were given in marriage as teenagers and never finished high school. Those marriages are usually contracted not officially, but in the mosque in a ceremony called nikah, that became increasingly popular, not only as a consequence of Islam spreading aggressively in Kazakhstan since independence but also because of no age restrictions for marriage. The title of the work comes from the practice called triple talaq, which allows Muslim men to divorce their wives by using the word talaq three times in person, over the phone or even in writing or in the text message. The option is not available to Muslim women, who can seek a divorce only after getting permission from their husbands, a cleric or other religious authorities. Muslim women are very vulnerable in a marriage institution like that and I address the issue of their invisibility in the Kazakhstani institutional digital system. In my artwork, a bride wears a red wedding dress and deprives herself of existence within this digital institutional system.
Annika Ernst Terwey
Like in Talaq, you use technology in your other works too. Can you tell us about the importance of new technology in your art?
Medina Bazargali
I study computer science and I am very interested in the mix of programming, new technologies, and art. For instance, my work For your safety only addresses a topic of the constant Internet blocking by the government of Kazakhstan. The majority of the population are forced to use a VPN and are used to the fact that a few hours a day, the Internet does not work. The reasons behind those blockings are political. In For your safety only I wanted to bring this situation to the point of absurdity and show how this propaganda deception looks from the outside. I built an ultrahigh-frequency generator that suddenly turns on several times per hour and interrupts continuous traffic of formulas and work of the oscillators, the work of the whole system. This project is a deceitful game of war led by a general generator, which devours itself, just like ouroboros eating its own tail.
In my latest work titled Within the law (2019) I directly engage with various frightening scenarios of the merging of the punitive-judicial system and new technologies. Viewers find themselves inside an installation that resembles the architecture of the NKVD interrogation rooms. However, when the viewer sits down behind the interrogation table they are faced by a machine that uses face-recognition technology and neural network, to create a criminal record on them. I trained the neural network on constitutions, civil, administrative and criminal codes of all former republics of the Soviet Union. In this space, the social "self" of a person is reduced to a simple piece of paper/dossier/ criminal record/sentence.
Saltanat Shoshanova
How do you imagine the future of the contemporary art of Kazakhstan? What path will it take and where does it lead?
Medina Bazargali
I would like to see more local, but not self-exoticizing works among the artists of my generation and the ones to come. I am convinced that the Kazakh Spring events already changed the course of art production in Kazakhstan. Though the demonstrations of radical activists are still roughly dispersed, some artists and activists do not fear repressions by authorities anymore and peaceful protests increasingly become very common. Maybe we’ll even see the huge development of the Kazakh actionism. But of course, official contemporary art may take the same role as it did in Russia — technological but politically neutral.
Saltanat Shoshanova is currently pursuing her Master's degree in History of Arts at the Free University Berlin. Her research interests include art in connection to queer and feminist theory, queer migration, decoloniality and post-Soviet space. She is an activist and co-organized several queer feminist conferences in Vienna and Berlin.
Annika Terwey is a German-Italian new media designer & artist. She studied visual communication at the Berlin University of the Arts and graduated from the new media class. In her work she is exploring new forms of communication through interaction design, video installation and exhibitions. Her interest range from environmental science, new technologies and human perception.
Editing: Ina Hildebrandt & Ira Konyukhova
English correction: Gustav Joncus