FOUND, INVENTED.
YEMAA Center of Contemporary Culture, 2021
Found, Invented was the first group exhibition of contemporary art at YEMAA, Atyrau's center for contemporary culture. The exhibition explored visual symbols in the work of artists born in the 1980s. Participants belong to different artistic schools, work across different media, and address a wide range of themes in their practice. Within the exhibition, we invited participants to consider the movement from traditional symbols to contemporary ones, from contemporary to post-contemporary, from contemporary to archaic, and back to traditional again. The French artist Jean Bazaine wrote that no one paints exactly as they wish, meaning that in every era the artist serves as a marker of their time, its witness and storyteller. Just as the zhyrau, the sal and sere once did, the work of the eight young artists in this project outlines for visitors a fragment of social reality as it appears to us, since each symbol on display represents a phenomenon of contemporary culture, from the entirely new signs of the consumerist age in the work of Lyazzat Khanim, to the appropriated and reclaimed imagery in Ermina Takenova's illustrations, to the classical theme of tradition in the work of Syrlybek Bekbotayev.
A further aim of the project was to introduce the West Kazakhstan scene to current artistic practices from other regions of the country, and, symmetrically, to bring certain living practices, forms, and symbols of the West Kazakhstan scene into the everyday life of people in other regions.
“No one paints as they wish”
We were born in the 1980s and came of age in a newly independent country searching for its own identity; submerged in the din of postcolonial debate, amid vigorous nation-building, in a space charged with authentic national art, tradition, racketeering, flea markets, curfews, and rolling power outages. Today we are in our thirties; the country appears, at first glance, to have settled, yet at times we still do not feel solid ground beneath us in the form of tradition. We are told Abai is everything to us, then that Abai is no one; we were told Pushkin was ours, only to find, on closer inspection, that he was not; we arrange dates at the monument to Khan Kene and imagine the brilliant meteor Shoqan is everything to us; we create patriotically charged images for Instagram pages using photographs of Alikhan and Turar, without examining the contradictions in the views and fates of these very different people; we drink coffee from Starbucks cups with a cigarette in hand, while enjoying the melodic sound of the azan, and now and then muse in passing on the ephemerality of gender. This is our mosaic reality in a world after ideology, religion, and secularism, after science and modernization, after history and capitalism. Reality expands in every direction at once, yet, we do not lose ourselves, for in a collaged reality we can be whoever we wish. And so we do not stop imagining and inventing, nor do we forget to find. This exhibition is a fair of everything that came to us and everything we imagined on our own.
Participating Artists: Anvar Musrepov, Bakhyt Bubikanova, Lyazzat Khanim, Dariya Temirkhan, Dariya Nurtazina, Mansur Smagambetov, Marat Dilman, Syrlybek Bekbotayev
Curators: Assel Akhmetzhanova and Assel Mukusheva
Curators: Assel Akhmetzhanova and Assel Mukusheva
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