ARTISTS FROM CENTRAL ASIA
our very special and very well selected editors pick
28th May 2020
The museums are only slowly opening in Europe and most of them have no contemporary art from artists living and working in Central Asia in them. That is why TransitoryWhite partnered up with Novastan.org to open up a little online showroom to talk about the artworks and their creators that we find intriguing. We proudly present our TransitoryWhite Editors Pick (Central Asia edition!)
ZOYA FALKOVA
lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan
Recently, I was stumbling upon a post on the internet where the daily routine of the last century genius was revealed:
waking up at six
making some exercises
having breakfast
working
reading
working
pause
working
lunch
working
in the late afternoon having coffee
and a stroll
dinner in the evening
meet other genius friends
go to bed not later than.
I was wondering for the first time when he would find time for the most essential work: change diapers and do the dishes?
selected by: Ira Konyukhova
DILYARA KAIPOVA
lives and works in Tashkent, Uzbekistan
Whilst living in Tashkent, I visited the Zero Line gallery, where Dilyaras artworks are exhibited. Although my Russian was very bad, the owner of the gallery, Bella Sabirova talked to me about Dilyaras work. Understanding Bella in Russian gave me a real lift, and I started saving for one of Dilyaras Chapans. Dilyara takes traditional Uzbek fabric and uses pop cultural motives and symbols. We look at it and most of us see a critique (or at least some sort confrontation) of globalization, mass culture, capitalism, the imperial west etc. I wonder: how would we look at Dilyaras work without aaaaany pop-cultural knowledge? Without knowing who mickey mouse and the scream are? Would we see faces? Would we notice? If yes,
what?
What would it do to us compared to what looking at Dilyaras works does to us now?
selected by: Kundry Reif
MURATBEK DJUMALIEV AND GULNARA KASMALIEVA
live and work in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
What can be more powerful than a collective force? Yet another artist duo from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan is liberating art practice by engaging in the form of the equal and close partnership. Their interdisciplinary body of work is an outcome of a joint process, which once again rejects the conventional understanding of artistic genius.
selected by: Tamara Khasanova
JAMSHED KHOLIKOV
lives and works in Dushanbe, Tajikistan
I know Jamshed since 2014, when I met him at Kyrgyzstan's annual Lazy Art Festival. Jamshed is a central figure behind "Dushanbe Art Ground", one of the main institutions for contemporary art in Tajikistan. We spent two weeks sleeping in a men's yurt during the night, together with Yura Useinov and Alexey Ulko from Uzbekistan, and doing Fluxus performances during the day. I remember him for his underwater stonemasonry - it is his chisel that plays the central role in our performance "Nail" - for supplying the tobacco which Yura used to almost poison a British musician playing the Mongolian horsehead fiddle, and for his enormous collection of photographs of Soviet and post-Soviet bus stops photographs, that far outstrips Christopher Herwig's.
selected by: Philipp Reichmuth
VYACHESLAV AKHUNOV
lives and works in Tashkent, Uzbekistan
The exponential explosion of photographic images and mass media since the beginning of the 20th century allowed many politicians to leave their marks in History with a brand new tool: the cult of personality. A moustache, a haircut, a garment—after being reproduced zillion times in newspapers—are nowadays more than enough to identify historic characters.
Vyacheslav Akhunov (born 1948) grew up in the omnipresence of a long-dead revolutionary: Lenin. When I visited his studio for the first time, after seeing again and again Lenin’s figure on the many collages the artist produced during the last decades, I started to feel nauseous. I could not bear that face anymore. It’s probably the same nauseous that Akhunov and other people had in the 1980s when reading magazines and books. . . His mantras are like an antidote, a vaccine made out of the virus itself, a magic recipe to conjure a spell.
But we should look at the world today to understand one essential thing in Akhunov’s artworks: many politicians (and not only dictators) are still applying rules that were defined in the last century. His great and funny collages are, on the first glance, about Lenin but, for the one who observes the mass media, they unveil the presence of the cult of personality in our everyday life.
selected by Thibaut de Ruyter
assorted by Kundry Reif