Sep 28 2017

Art Across Almaty: Highlights from Artbat Fest 8

by Lesley Ann Gray

The conceit of life as a pre-programmed game was encountered outside of the Arman Cinema as Almapoliya (2017), or the game of Monopoly with a distinctly Almaty geography. Visitors were encouraged to roll the dice and play. All photos by Lesley Ann Gray for ArtAsiaPacific.

As part of the Artbat Fest educational offerings, the School of Artistic Gesture is a competitive and juried program for young artists under the direction of artist and curator YULIYA SOROKINA. Successful applicants who attend lectures and master classes then participate in an exhibition. This year, the show was held at the Arman Cinema, a former disco during the post-Soviet period that has returned to its original function as a theater. The exhibition “Act of Creation” was organized by young Kazakhstani curator Vladislav Sludskiy and featured work by young and established artists, such as BAKHYT BUBICANOVA and SUINBIKE SULEIMENOVA.

The pottery installation Nur Breakfast (2017) by GAFURA KAIRBEKOVA and KARINA KRYLOVA takes a humorous look at our obsession with branding. In this case, common breakfast products have all been renamed, but we cannot shake off the mental associations with the originals.

BAKHYT BUBICANOVA’s ready-made installation Kepki (2017) of baseball caps on shelves mimics the central bazaar in Almaty where one can purchase caps emblazoned with their clan’s name to flaunt their familial affiliation. In this selfie-ready installation, people could try on their own clan’s cap or adopt a new identity by choosing a different cap.

Young Kazakh artist SUINBIKE SULEIMENOVA fed the curatorial statement of the exhibition through a computer program that searches Twitter feeds for discursive keywords in Aura Errora (2017). The monitor is a live feed of all of the tweets that contain these keywords via hashtags. Here, the artist plays with language, meaning, intent and teleology.

A moving video piece by TATYANA AKHMETGALIEVA, entitled The Wound (2013), uses the visual metaphor of an unraveling of a woven fabric to express the collective suffering of a community as it comes apart because of trauma.

ASSEL KADYRKHANOVA’s installation The Machine (2013–17) churns out names and discards them on the floor to consider the mechanization of death by bureaucracy during the Great Purge of 1936–38, which was a campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union.

On the balconies of the Almaty Art Center overlooking the landscape was a new series of minimalist installations by young Georgian artist LADO LOMITASHVILI, all based on Kazakh cultural symbols—the yurt, traditional ornaments and the golden eagle.

In Feeling of Europe (2017), Kazakh artists LEONID KGAN and DANA ISKAKOVA question identity and place throughout a train journey from Zurich to Almaty, determining how “European” or “Asian” each stop along the way seemed to them, and how European or Asian the artists felt—and appeared to others—as they transitioned across the continents.

On the same train journey, for her installation Natural Feeling, Swiss artist ANNE-LAURE FRANCHETTE’s collected common plants from stops along the way, and then placed them in pots on a piece of a construction fence banner, illuminated by a UV light. She mused about how some foreign plants are labeled “exotic” and therefore coveted, while others are considered to be weeds and marked as undesirable invasive species.

Now in its eighth year, Artbat Fest created a vibrant urban image for Almaty without any governmental support from the city, relying solely on private donors. This year, the event’s organizers partnered with the Eurasian Cultural Alliance, ArtTube (Russia), the Zurich University of Arts (ZHdK) and the Soros Foundation for a series of exhibitions that sprawled across the city, to the suburbs and back. Almaty is the former capital of Kazakhstan, full of parks and leafy boulevards lined by water canals and hip cafes. Wedding-cake, low-rise mansions from the czarist period sit next to Soviet modernist apartment buildings as well as contemporary steel and glass towers, giving the easy-going and walkable city plenty of cosmopolitan character.

Artbat’s theme for this year, “8bit,” takes the city as its muse to make a game of its urban environment, positing that life itself is a game that has been programmed for us, but which we shape as players. In this rapidly changing, post-Soviet—and eventually, post-oil—country, these ideas have a particular potency for a population that is experiencing a period of vast economic development funded by oil, but still figuring out how to navigate a world that is being constructed around them. “8bit” represents nostalgia for the past, for a time in which things were simpler and where the rules of the game were clear; is this also the framework for the future, albeit in a new incarnation?

Artbat Fest 8 ran for the month of September at various locations in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.