Aspan Gallery in Almaty has opened a solo exhibition by Said Atabekov, one of the country’s most revered artists, while millennial Kazakh artist Gulnur Mukazhanova currently has a solo show in Venice. Both artists explore the theme of Kazakh identity, a complex and controversial subject explored today by artists of all ages and generations searching for their own sense of national identity.

As a young nation Kazakhstanis have been facing pressing questions: “Who are we?” and “Where are we going?” a kind of self-questioning which has been reflected in its art over the past few decades. The experience of Soviet colonization, aggressively ideological, separated the peoples of the USSR from their national past. During the 1990s, the former Soviet republics looked to revive their national traditions at a political level. On the one hand, the question of identity had already been present in Kazakh culture - both unofficial and semi-official - during the Soviet era, and in the late 20th century artists expanded this theme more boldly than their predecessors. On the other hand, their art also had to critically engage with the interpretations of identity promoted by the authoritarian regime of Nursultan Nazarbayev.

This second approach is particularly strong in the work of Yerbosyn Meldibekov (b. 1964), who has consistently explored both Soviet experiences and anti-totalitarian themes. One of his early works made in 1999, ‘Monument to an Unknown Batyr’, features four taxidermy hooves standing on a pedestal, an image which Meldibekov still continues to reinterpret today. It is ultimately an equestrian monument to any ruler or hero, depending on the prevailing ideology of time and place. This piece was originally made as a direct response to the Kazakhi government’s attempt to assert a ‘national identity’ by replacing Soviet statues in public squares with monuments to Kazakh national heroes, often with biographies falsified to suit contemporary narratives. The image of the ‘universal’ monument which he later developed into the installation ‘Transformer’ for Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in 2020, aptly encapsulated the state of Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan where novel ideas and values served merely as facades, masking a familiar hierarchical model of power and society.

Even more intriguing is Meldibekov’s lesser-known street sculpture ‘The Birth of the Saddle’ created in 2018 a work which pays homage to the renowned Kazakh artist Rustam Khalfin (1949–2008) and his famous performance where a friend of the artist sat naked on a clay mass placed on a horse’s back, creating a perfect saddle shape. Khalfin’s project reflected the nomadic culture’s intrinsic ideas of creation and tactile engagement with the world. Meldibekov reproduced the experiment, replacing clay with plaster, then casting the saddle in bronze and mounting it on a toy horse sculpture carved from Almaty elm. In Meldibekov’s work, this material symbolized Kazakh identity, moulded, and suppressed by the myths of Soviet upbringing, as explored in his project ‘Self-Portraits with My Idols’ (2014–2022). Throughout this process, Meldibekov revived Khalfin’s exploration of identity. Most important of all, he created an alternative, democratic version of an equestrian monument, open to the viewer (no pedestals or barriers), ‘infantile’ in form (lacking oppressive grandeur), ‘national’ in material, and referencing grassroots traditions. These qualities allow the work to be interpreted as a critique of the image of national identity imposed by the authorities.

One of the most elegant projects, satirically critiquing the elite’s exploitation of grandiosity against a backdrop of imperial trauma – a psychological form of revenge – is a work called ‘When All The People Were Qazaqs’ created in 2013 by Kuanysh Bazargaliyev (b. 1969). The project’s narrative is a post-apocalyptic myth: after global warming and a great flood, only Kazakhstan survives due to its unique geographical location at the heart of Eurasia. For the descendants of the survivors, history is flamboyantly rewritten in an ideologically advantageous way. The works in this project reinterpret classic paintings ‘in an Asian manner’. Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait is transformed into Alibek Dyurov, while King Ferdinand VII of Spain becomes the mayor of city A. In a similar vein, Bazargaliyev’s 2017 ‘Qoshqar-myuizm’ adapts the traditional Kazakh ram’s horn ornament (qoshqar mүйiz) to numerous recognizable brands, including works by Jackson Pollock (Pollokbayev) and Mark Rothko (Rothkobekov). Bazargaliyev not only mocks the state’s manipulations of identity, which lead to the trivialization and the hollowing of traditions but also highlights the challenges of reconciling national and global contexts for post-Soviet societies. In the framework of ‘post-colonial revenge’, Bazargaliyev colonizes global culture, rapidly Kazakhizing it.

A particularly powerful and resonant statement, deeply rooted in national tradition, was made in 2022 by Askat Akhmedyarov (b. 1965), once a leading figure of the ‘Kyzyl Tractor’ group. At his solo exhibition ‘YMIT’ at Aspan Gallery in Almaty, the artist presented the installation ‘Sabyr’ (Tranquility) consisting of fifty-seven overturned cauldrons hanging at a low height which filled the entire hall. The title of the installation referred to the traditional call of the police during protests: “Stay calm!” In steppe culture, a cauldron carries profound meaning, symbolizing the family hearth so an overturned cauldron is a tragic symbol of loss and a destroyed home, and conservative Kazakhs still reacts painfully to such imagery. Through this reference to traditional national culture, Akhmedyarov addressed the January Tragedy that occurred six months before the exhibition. A society exhausted by years of social injustice and the destruction of the country by its elites mourns its fellow citizens, who died during the January events mainly from police bullets. So here, “Staying calm” is no longer possible, and this desperate state is symbolized by the fact that viewers cannot move through the hall without touching the cauldrons. They collide with each other, producing a ringing sound, a mournful music that never fully subsides.

The power of national tradition as a potential for protest also appears in the works of Gulnur Mukazhanova (b. 1984), who creates large-scale series and installations executed in the traditional felt-making technique. Currently, her exhibition ‘Memory of Hope’ is on in Venice until February 2025, a new iteration of her project which Art Focus Now recently wrote about. Traditional felt also features in the works of young Kazakhstani artists Medina Bazargali (b. 2001) and Kokonja (b. 1996), who showcased their multimedia installation "Will There Be Freedom Then?" at Hong Kong’s Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textiles in Spring of 2023. This work was an ornamental, handmade tent, inside which the viewer found their reflection in video as a shadow accompanied by labels like gender, race and anxiety level. The artists depicted the pressures of colonial models that persist within Kazakhstan with its internal content painfully clashing with the external and the desired. It is as if Bazargali and Kokonja were reminding viewers of the need for internal liberation and self-discovery.

The internal potential of society hidden within tradition becomes the theme of an installation made by Said Atabekov's (b. 1965) this year called ‘Kazygurt Portal’ (2024) one of the centrepieces at his solo exhibition ‘Prayer of a Thousand Horse Riders’ at Almaty’s Aspan Gallery. It is dedicated to the traditional steppe game of kokpar. A harsh and traumatic sport, a kind of horseback rugby in which participants must throw a goat carcass (often replaced by a dummy nowadays) into the opponent's circle. In some contemporary versions, teams compete 5-on-5, though historically, up to several hundred riders could participate. Atabekov has been studying kokpar for years and has created many works on this theme. Now, he has assembled a large-scale installation from items in his own collection connected to the game or which he found directly on the battlefield. In ‘Kazygurt Portal’, different eras intersect whether imperial, Soviet, and contemporary – a quilted jacket is placed with a red star alongside a saddle decorated with the Dolce & Gabbana logo. Photographs of veteran players and children’s saddles on wheels, male players and their supportive spouses come together. Horse bones, horseshoes, issues of the short-lived magazine ‘Kokpar Central Asia’, battle-tested gear, photo collages featuring kokpar in outer space or on Red Square – all merge as chaotically as the players in the game. The energetic charge of competition in the installation gives viewers some relief. Its rough aesthetics match the brutal nature of the game. Atabekov has created a cosmos of kokpar combining countless individual fates, efforts, and expressions of will. His photography series ‘Prayer of a Thousand Horse Riders’ (2013–2023) and ‘Steppe Wolves’ (2010–2024) reveal the rawness of personal confrontation with existence, capturing moments of tension and departure from everyday rhythms. ‘Kazygurt Portal’ brings all this together. Tradition becomes a source, a space of models and experiences to which contemporary society can turn for support. Reflecting on the past not only processes and heals trauma but also provides a psychologically and intellectually vital foundation for acting in the present.

Also noteworthy is a polyethylene painting by Saule Suleimenova (b. 1970) who has become one of Kazakhstan's most popular artists today for her experiments with an original technique. Using a hot glue gun, she creates collages made from plastic bags on a plastic base. In 2022, at her solo exhibition in the art space ‘House 36’ on Baribayev Street in Almaty, Suleimenova presented works from two landmark cycles. In the first, ‘Saga of Returnees’ she focuses on Kazakh repatriates who preserved their identity and traditions despite being separated from their homeland and escaping the ideological influence of Soviet power (Qandas is the official term for an ethnic Kazakh repatriate in Kazakhstan). For Suleimenova, this offers an alternative view of Kazakhstan’s history and character which is also necessary to fully understanding the nation’s past. The second cycle, ‘Xinjiang Purge’, addresses the forced erasure of identity among Kazakhs and Uyghurs in China. Here, Suleimenova creates a literal yet expressive metaphor: female figures literally fade from canvas to canvas until they become ghostly silhouettes, in sharp contrast to the vibrant images of the qandas. Suleimenova’s exploration of complex themes of ‘them/us’ ties identity to unity and empathy. The mosaic nature of her works reflects the intricate process of reconstructing the self, traditions, and the past, which requires unbiased reflection. The symbolic role of polyethylene’s eternity, capable of outlasting historical upheavals, is also significant. The content-rich working method itself, her struggle to harmonize an inorganic material, adds another layer of meaning.