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Abstract
After the Soviet collapse, the newly independent states of Central Asia found themselves in the process of forming their own national “imagined communities.” This was done to legitimize their existing territorial integrity, their rights to their titular ethnicities, and the position of political elites. This process expressed itself through the creation of particular symbols, myths, and rituals which distinguished the nation but were also used to legitimize the nation's right to exist. The symbolic and ideological construction was influenced by the former Soviet era. For example, symbolically the country was still called Rodina (motherland), but most of the symbols of power were represented by male images, for example, Amir Timur in Uzbekistan or Ablay Khan in Kazakhstan. The tradition of representing power through a male connotation had a long history in Soviet Central Asia. Interestingly, however, some contemporary artists took an alternative view and used feminine images as strong, central symbols of their interpretation of national identity, contesting the official view of nation-building. This paper seeks to trace the development of the feminine and masculine dichotomy of representation by comparing official iconography with works of famous female artists such as Umida Akhmedova from Uzbekistan and Saule Suleimenova and Almagul Menlibayeva from Kazakhstan.
Key words:
Acknowledgements
This work would not have been possible without the help and support of my respondents. I thank the artists who allowed me to use their work for the analysis of this paper: Photo album “Women and Men: from dawn to dusk” and “Burden of Virginity” film (Umida Akhmedova); “I am Kazakh” (Saule Suleimenova); and “Transoxiana Dreams,” “My Silk Road to you,” “Milk for Lambs,” and “Kurchatov 22” (Almagul Menlibayeva). I am very grateful to Almagul, Saule, and Umida, as well as to Valeriya Ibraeva, Maria Vilkovisky, Georgy Mamedov, and many more other respondents for finding the time to talk to me. These interviews were of great inspiration beyond the present article. Valeria Ibrayeva has provided me with much food for thought since 2011 and throughout this research. Prajakti Kalra was of a great help in discussions about gender and art in Central Asia and at different times Alex Ulko, Aliya de Tiesenhausen, and Yevgeniya Plakhina made me challenge my conceptual frameworks on “female art” in Central Asia and I am grateful to them for this “food for thought.”
I must also thank the organizers of the workshop “Gender and Nation in Central Asia” in Paris in the summer of 2012 where this paper was first presented. Juliette Cleuziou, Lucia Direnberger, Iman Karzabi, and Anna Jarry-Omarova have been behind the amazing project of this workshop and publication and I am indebted to them for their encouragement and comments. I also want to thank anonymous peer reviewers for their comments. My work in Cambridge was largely supported by the guidance and inspiration found within the Cambridge Central Asia Forum community and I owe much gratitude to Prof. Montu Saxena and Prajakti Kalra for their helpful advice and support. I am especially thankful to my supervisor Dr. David Lane who was a great teacher throughout these years and always found great ways to encourage me.
Notes
1. Umida Akhmedova's interview with the author, Tashkent, September 2012 fieldwork.
2. The album that described different aspects of the typical life of men and mostly women in modern Uzbekistan, included poverty and gender inequality both in private (oppression within the family by husbands and their relatives) and in public (biased discrimination in labor). What Akhmedova tried to present was how she saw her own country. In an interview with the cultureuz.net website, she expressed the view that the artist has to transcend his or her own feelings about the object he/she is trying to portray independently of its environment – people or landscapes – and that photography is an excellent tool for understanding the nation:
you can look at these ordinary people, at their everyday lifestyle [byt] and the nation [people] becomes clearer. This is all transmitted through the love and sadness of the author [artist], through his/her knowledge of the place and the characteristics of the nation, through his/her experience. (Akhmedova Citation2007)
3. The regimes’ version of nation-building in Central Asia and particularly in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan (the two case studies in the present article) are defined by power relations in which “power is exercised by means of coercion (or the possibility of it) and/or by the construction of meaning on the basis of the discourses through which social actors guide their action” (Castells Citation2009, 10). Power in this field of decision-making over national representation is also defined by domination, “which is the power that is embedded in the institutions of society” (Castells Citation2009, 10). The power/domination discourse which was discussed in my interviews with artists was represented by male connotations.
4. Here I have elaborated Almagul Menlibayeva's idea of the objectification, through nomenclature, of the local cultural frameworks around typical ethno-cultural limitations expressed in forms of “souvenirs they saw when they first went abroad” (quote from Menlibayeva's interview with the author, December 2013, Brussels-Prague).
5. Here I use the term used by Valeria Ibrayeva, an Almaty-based art critic and former director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Almaty, interview with the author, January 2013, Almaty.
6. The present study is based on more than 40 various interviews with artists, intellectuals, young writers, and art critics collected during the author's fieldwork in Central Asia between 2011 and 2013.
7. President of the Kazakhstan Association of Designers, prominent artist and author of many visual projects of official symbolism, for example, the first design of the national currency (1993), interview with the author, August 2012, Almaty.
8. Umida Akhmedova, interview with the author, September 2012, Tashkent.
9. In an interview with Forbes Kazakhstan magazine, young Kazakh contemporary artist Bakhyt Bubikanova (Kazakhelinskii superethnos 2014) described contemporary art as “willing to reveal something that is happening now, contemporary.” Bubikanova's own most recent work focuses on her interpretation of the new national ideology in Kazakhstan (Kazakh eli – Kazakh nation). In Kazakhelinskii super-ethnos (2014) she depicted the naked female body dressed in all attributes of male power relations in Kazakhstan (e.g. police uniform) along with typical attributes of female roles in Kazakh society, for example, child bearing.
10. Umida Akhmedova, interview with the author, September 2012, Tashkent.
11. Valeria Ibrayeva, Almaty-based art critic and former director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Almaty, interview with the author, January 2013, Almaty.
12. Valeria Ibrayeva, interview with the author, April 2011, Almaty. The idea of cultural and historical monumental alteration is also central to the “Family album” work by Kazakh artist Yerbolsyn Meldibekov who combined family pictures taken in front of a Soviet monument and continued taking a series of pictures while the plinth of the monument was changing over time after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
13. Almagul Menlibayeva, famous Kazakhstani artist, interview with the author, December 2013, Prague-Brussels.
14. Umida Akhmedova's interview with the author, Tashkent, September 2012 fieldwork.
15. Almagul Menlibayeva, famous Kazakhstani artist, interview with the author, December 2013, Prague-Brussels.
16. Although loyal intelligentsia, or what can also be called a failed intelligentsiaa, is in my view a widespread concept in the post-Soviet space in general, there are many members of the Soviet intelligentsia who decided not to be co-opted by the ruling regimes. Many post-Soviet Central Asian writers and intellectuals have decided to take positions of either independent or oppositional intellectuals. Such prominent writers as Mukhtar Magauin, for example, continue to work outside of Kazakhstan openly declaring personal rejection of President Nazarbayev's ideology and vision on nation-building.
17. Author's interview with a political analyst, Anonymous, April 2011, Almaty.
18. Author's interview with “SHTAB” residents, June 2013, Bishkek.
19. Author's interview with an art critic, April 2011, Almaty.
20. Valeria Ibrayeva, Almaty-based art critic and former director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Almaty, interview with the author, April 2011, Almaty.
21. Erboyssin Meldibekov's interview to Valeria Ibrayeva (2006), available at: http://blogbasta.kz/?p=3238, original available from V. Ibrayeva.
22. Erboyssin Meldibekov’s interview to Valeria Ibrayeva (2006), available at: http://blogbasta.kz/?p=3238, original available from V. Ibrayeva.
23. The peaceful strike of oil company workers in Western Kazakhstan's small town of Zhanaozen that lasted for several months resulted in protests on 16 December – the 12th anniversary of Kazakhstan's independence from the Soviet Union as well as the 24th anniversary of the 16 December 1986 uprising in Soviet Almaty against Moscow's decision to dismiss Kazakh First Secretary Dinmukhamed Kunayev and replace him with a Russian Kolbin. The Zhanaozen uprisings resulted in shots allegedly fired by either police or unknown agitators and resulted in 16 casualties among civilians. Shortly after the Zhanaozen events, several videos of shootings and casualties were uploaded onto Youtube. Videos were made by amateurs (residents of Zhanaozen) using their cell phones. Yerbossyn Meldibekov's video art “The Independence Day” is shot in the same fashion with cell phones and is staged on the streets in an unidentifiable city in Kazakhstan where the noise of gunfire is heard and male voices of those running from the shooters are heard speaking Kazakh and saying “Run! Run!” All of them are male.
24. Almagul Menlibayeva, Kazakhstani artist, interview with the author, December 2013, Prague-Brussels.
25. Taken from the author's interviews with Almagul Menlibayeva (December 2013) and Umida Akhmedova (September 2012) where their first answers related to the experience of learning and transforming as artists from one type of media to another. I found this similarity striking because both of them put relative weight on the transformation period, when they took over the position of both directing and censoring the picture, the performance, and the person pictured.
26. See Menlibayeva's “The Eternal Bride” (2001) video where she walks alone in a wedding dress around the wintery streets of Almaty and talks to people, inventing various stories but mostly watching and depicting their reactions to her appearance.
27. Almagul Menlibayeva, Kazakhstani artist, interview with the author, December 2013, Prague-Brussels.
28. Interview with the author, January 17, 2013, Almaty, Kazakhstan.
29. Maria Vilkoviskaya, Kazakhstani artist, interview with the author, December 2013, Prague-Almaty.
30. From an interview with Almagul Menlibayeva with the author, in which she described how the initial goal for many of her most successful and well-known works of art, for example, “Transoxania Dreams,” was to “represent my country, to show who we are, to tell the story” opposed to the story of the “souvenirization of culture” on the official level as she has defined it.
31. By that I mean the feeling of tightening control of the state which Akhmedova (who has experienced it personally through the court and then amnesty) and Saule Suleimenova (who was surprised to get invitations to art exhibitions in Astana) have expressed simultaneously in their interviews. This theme was not central to their feelings or representations though, and I would even argue that the sense of the official censorship of their work is something more of a background and passive rather than threatening and influential. This is why I mention authoritarianism here as both an imagined and presumably real experience but framed as a symbol rather than objective reality.
32. I have chosen these three artists because in my opinion they represent the avant-garde of female art in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Aside from that, I evaluate their success by their social capital in artistic and other circles both in Central Asia and abroad.
33. Almagul Menlibayeva, Kazakhstani artist, interview with the author, December 2013, Prague-Brussels.
34. Saule Suleimenova, Kazakhstani artist, author's interview, April 2011, Almaty.
35. Umida Akhmedova's interview with the author, Tashkent, September 2012 fieldwork.
36. Almagul Menlibayeva, Kazakhstani artist, interview with the author, December 2013, Prague-Brussels.
37. Saule Suleimenova, Kazakhstani artist, author's interview, April 2011, Almaty.
38. Saule Suleimenova, Kazakhstani artist, author’s interview, April 2011, Almaty.
39. Saule Suleimenova, Kazakhstani artist, author’s interview, April 2011, Almaty.
40. Almagul Menlibayeva, Kazakhstani artist, interview with the author, December 2013, Prague-Brussels.
