In former Soviet republics such as Kazakhstan, the relationship with the Soviet past is often problematic, either in the form of nostalgia or as an attempt to distance oneself at all costs. This seems to prevent a serious engagement with the future, argues Kulshat Medeuova, who focuses on the Kazakh pavilion at the Venice Biennale and looks at artworks that give us an idea of Kazakh futurism.
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There is a special kind of post-Soviet competition: Who has moved further and better away from the Soviet past? The criteria for comparison can be anything: where there is more authoritarianism or democracy, who has had a war, how many revolutions have taken place, who is more influential in the region, who has been able to work through the ‘difficult’ Gulag past and is ready for a decolonial agenda, and who does not understand why recent history should be rewritten.
The most straightforward competition comparisons are in sports, economics, and, of course, culture. Thus, at the 60th anniversary of the Venice Biennale, many experts compared the Kazakh and Uzbek pavilions. According to Dilda Ramazan, the Uzbek pavilion was more “presentable and solemn in front of the global art community” (2024). It seems that the Kazakhs lost here to their southern neighbor: the space is smaller, and instead of a solid woven monotony and theatrical design, it is an assemblage of works from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, or, as Nikolai Smirnov (2024) noted, a steppe heterotopia.
One of the main protagonists of the Kazakhstani pavilion, Kamil Mullashev (b. 1944), turns 80 this year. He became known for his graduation work, the triptych “Earth and Time. Kazakhstan,” painted in 1978. The Tretyakov Gallery acquired the triptych the same year. It became a regular exhibit at major all-Union and international exhibitions devoted to the USSR’s achievements in space and on Earth. In 1981, Mullashev’s works were selected for the exhibitions “Fine Art of the Kazakh SSR” in Moscow and “We Are Building Communism” in Moscow and Leningrad. In 1984, the triptych was among the hundred best works of Soviet art shown at the exhibition “Traditions and Search” in Paris.
Post-apocalyptic horizons
Two works from this legendary triptych, “Youth” and “Above the White Desert,” were presented among six other works at the Kazakh exposition “Zheruyk: A Look Beyond the Horizon” at this year’s Venice Biennale. In a small room, they are juxtaposed with the video essay “Alastau” by Anvar Musrepov (born in 1994). Alastau is an ancient custom of herbal fumigation, purification, and healing. The young artist and curator Musrepov, already in the style of his generational fearlessness before various zombie characters and bodily practices-experiments, creates in this visual work a post-apocalyptic horizon full of sounds and images of the very Steppe that Mulashev’s works are about. Only instead of pure, almost transparent space, there are ruins of modernist gifts, mangled earth with bodies with broken geometry, hulks of trees illuminated in fluorescent green like vertical lines of code from the “Matrix” films, and drones logging attempts to heal again.
It is incredible how two diploma works, separated by almost half a century of time and artistic traditions, suddenly tell the viewer that something has happened and is happening in Kazakhstan. You may not have noticed this last earthly frontier, but it is there, where thousands of plateaus have absorbed thousands of utopias. The destiny of Kazakhstan is the destiny of resource provinces, reserve factories, secret laboratories, and military cities around nuclear and missile test sites, experimental bacteriological islands and atomic fields. Kazakhstan is a buffer between global geopolitical players; it is one of the fronts between Earth and space. It is no accident that Anton Vidokle shot his space films in Kazakhstan, and not necessarily at Baikonur because many places here absorb the cosmic as a premonition of other perspectives.
Mulashev has never been to the Baikonur cosmodrome either, but how did he see his space? His biography has all the rebuses of the Soviet period: born in China, living in Kazakhstan, studying in Moscow. His artistic background includes both the Xinjiang Art Institute and the Surikov Moscow State Art Institute. He is so professional that he can easily change styles and directions once a decade, the main thing that remains in his work is a sense of space that inspires confidence in scale. It’s as if the viewer can see a person’s face even though only their back is in the painting. It is a sense of volume when each object placed in the space of the canvas has its own dynamic.
The last earthly frontier
As Mulashev says in an unpublished interview I conducted with him: “I never, then and now, plan a theme. I am intuitive about what I paint; the subject matter comes later. How did this space come about if I didn’t think about it? During my first year of studies, I had a sea plein air in Kerch, Crimea. Kerch provided perfect conditions: the sea, acacia garden, clean bed, food, and even the models were with us. Perfectly good. But I keep painting from morning till evening this sea, painting, painting, and I don’t like my work. Although since childhood I have loved Aivazovsky and copied him a lot, when you are looking for your style, this sea is too alien for me. In the second year, I had a forest plein air in the Moscow suburbs. The conditions there are good too. The forest is so beautiful, so dormant, rivers and forest again. I know the forest. The forest kind of fascinates me. I loved Shishkin and Levitan, too; I painted and copied them a lot. And again, I failed. I found nothing but trees; somehow, the meaning was lost. Maybe because in Russia, the forest is dark green; it just fills everything like a wall, and you can’t do anything about it.”
Mulashev goes on: “And finally, I started to ask my teachers if I could go to Kazakhstan for a holiday; it was more understandable for me there. I got the permission and came with it to the Union of Artists of Kazakhstan, and they went to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan to the Department of Culture. And everyone rejoiced. […] It was necessary to paint virgin epics. I was sent to Atbasar. It’s a virgin center there; the central grain-growing region includes several state farms. And I was driven around the grain growers, given the task to draw the directors and all these foremost workers. But at some point, I again set a condition: stop using me, I need cattle breeding and the Steppe. I need the Steppe. And then I was sent to Kurgalzhino. Not just to the center of the district, but 200 kilometers away. Under a political slogan reminiscent of the Virgin Lands Campaign, the authorities there organized a youth shepherd brigade.
“Young people who had just finished school were agitated to unite into livestock breeding youth brigades. There were 10 yurts separately for girls and boys, and a Red Corner was in one yurt. They put me in this yurt. I was familiar with shepherd life, and I understood well everything going on there and that young people wanted their own entertainment, not only work. And I made friends with them very quickly, gave them dancing evenings, and, of course, drew them a lot. The land there was flat, with millions of stars at night, no lighting, and airplanes flying. There were only stars and infinity. But it was an infinity that was never empty. I didn’t think much about space; I was far from space. But one day, half the sky became bright. Gradually, a semicircle was formed; it increased, and as if it was taking over the sky, half of the sky was dark, and half was glowing. It turned out to be a rocket flight.
When I returned to Moscow, the teachers saw my drawings as different from other students’ works. Because they had only green paintings, as I assumed. And I had Steppe, mountains, shepherds, chauffeurs, sheep, and horses. And everything was incomprehensible but exciting for them, the Moscow people. One of my teachers recommended that I clear the space of all these details to leave the Steppe, the Steppe for which I returned to Kazakhstan.
This triptych is essential not only for me. After the collapse of the Soviet economy, all that scrap metal, boredom, and roadlessness remained there, but I saw with my own eyes something different. My space is not smiling cosmonauts. It is an endless horizon, and our Steppe is a stoppage of time, like that parachute that stretched out smoothly and began to fall, or on the contrary, to rise upwards.”
A body without soul
Mulashev’s “Youth” has another informal title: “Parachute.” In fact, we see two moving objects in it: a huge parachute filled with air and therefore rising, and a small figure of a cosmonaut moving away from the parachute and toward the viewer, while everything else in this work is the steppe. Here we have a phenomenology of the steppe: pure, smooth, eternal, able to absorb everything: a cosmonaut in a spacesuit and Albasty from Anvar Musrepov’s work. By placing the two works and the canvas next to each other and creating a special technical lighting in the room of the chamber, the viewer gets a 3D effect of the transition of the sound of the video essay into the space of Mulashev’s works framed by a metallized baguette frame. This frame, like a screen, absorbs the colors of the video essay and reveals that behind the image of light, social (socialist) romanticism, there is something else, that these works are not about the optimism of the cosmic future.
Albasty – an ancient female spirit, the personification of guilt, found in folklore throughout the Caucasus mountains, with origins going as far back as Sumerian mythology – is an ancient image that can be interpreted in a variety of ways, from a maternal deity to creatures that steal a person’s lungs, which are the dwelling place of the human soul. A body without a soul is not quite the same as a body without organs. A body without organs has a plan of immanence, if Gilles Deleuze is to be believed. If we think of Kazakh (or Turkic) mythology, a body without a soul has only the space of search – to seek and find its place – where the missing is found. The central theme of the pavilion is Zheruyuk. In the nomadic worldview, this is not only the concept of a promised land, but also the recognition that it can only be good where you love something on this earth. If you love it, it’s your eternal world, and if you don’t, it’s just another utopia. At one point, Kazakhstan even discussed the possibility of dropping the -stan suffix so as not to join the ranks of competing countries with the suffix in their names. To regain a sense of entitlement to this territory and become Kazak Yel – the land of Kazakhs or Manglik Yel – the eternal land. Conceptually, it is close to the position of philosophical perspectivism: the future depends on the point where you are now.
Being in the Kazakhstan pavilion at the Venice Biennale, we feel entitled to our vision of the future. Anvar Musrepov has chosen an appropriate term for this confidence: Kazakhofuturism. Why not, why not stop competing with the past and think more about the future? Let us imagine that after all these pavilions are dismantled in Venice, different futurists will meet: Asians, Africans, South Americans and many other ‘foreigners’ and discuss with those who remained in the camp of the ‘imperialists.’ This situation is more intriguing than arguments about who has moved further away from the Soviet past.