A new art exhibition in Almaty takes a fresh look at Kazakhstan’s grim totalitarian past, with contemporary artists offering a personal touch as they illustrate the Stalinist repressions that devastated the region in the 1930s.
The artistic displays are accompanied by personal explanations about how the political repressions affected the artists’ own families.
Zitta Sultanbayeva offers an installation called Silence of the Lambs, showing a school yearbook with some faces carefully sliced out. She explains that her work was inspired by family photo albums: As a child, she was surprised to see that in some pictures people had been cut out, leaving blank spaces. Her grandmother explained that her husband had removed them with a razor, believing the Stalinist rhetoric that they were “enemies of the people.”
Azhar Dzhandosova and Botagoz Tolesheva display a torn rug called Carpet of Memory, explaining how they destroyed it to symbolize the senseless destruction of lives in purges. Both of Dzhandosova’s grandfathers – the prominent Kazakh intellectuals Oraz Dzhandosov and Ilyas Dzhansugurov – were killed in the purges of the 1930s, but their families did not learn their fates for another 20 years.
Asel Kadyrkhanova created an installation showing a typewriter surrounded by reams of red ribbon and heaps of blank arrest warrants, with the typewriter – popularly called “mashinka” in Russian – symbolizing the machine of terror.
Timur Nusimbekov and Kayrat Temirgali show a video installation called Spassk, the name of one of the labor camps in the gulag system centered around Karaganda in central Kazakhstan. Haunting images of barbed wire, blue sky seen through bars, and the administrative center of the gulag in the village of Dolinka (which is now a museum of repression) are projected onto a white wall.
Saule Suleymenova displays haunting paintings of women, including her grandmother, who were sent to the Alzhir camp in northern Kazakhstan, which housed women whose only crime was being related to an “enemy of the state.”
The exhibition opened on October 25 and runs through November 14 at the Abylkhan Kasteyev State Museum of Arts in Almaty.
Joanna Lillis is a journalist based in Almaty and author of Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan.
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