Ablikim Akmullayev

Ablikim (Boris) Akmullayev is a renowned Kazakh visual and video artist, musician, and photographer. He works in a large number of contemporary art media, including drawing, painting, photography, installation, performance, and video. In addition to his painting and video art, for twenty-five years Akmullayev has been interested in creating live sound with percussion and woodwind instruments. Beginning in 1988, Akmullayev was a part of the Green Triangle (Зеленый треугольник), and, since 1998, was a part of Group of Four (Группа четырех). Since 1998, he has been a member of percussion ensemble Bugarabu. Since 2000, he has also been half of ZITABL, an art duo.

Akmullayev is an autodidact. Of him, you could say: “Shine on, you crazy diamond!” When he was sixteen, instead of signing his name in his passport, he wrote “Pink Floyd”! The artist recalled: “In January 1980, I heard Pink Floyd’s new album The Wall in Alma-Ata. I was fifteen. My friend Igor Poluyakhtov spent the next year translating Roger Waters’s lyrics from this album. I was the first person who heard it—and, deeply impressed, I fell into the world of Mr. Pink. When I was issued a passport in 1981, I naturally signed it ‘Pink Floyd.’ My teacher at school told me that I had ruined my life and I would not be accepted to a single institution of higher learning and, moreover, I would never be allowed to travel abroad. I was programmed by Mr. Pink. I realized this as I stood in front of a judge, my head shaved, on trial in the aftermath of my psychedelic experiments. This was right before my twentieth birthday in 1989. … In those nine years, I’d gotten a good taste of life. And when a new photograph was glued into my passport, following the example of the Sex Pistols, I wrote, ‘I HATE Pink Floyd!’ over it. But I regret nothing.” [1]

With the symbolic painting Proryv [Breakthrough] (1988, ZAM, 2000.0740), the artist expressed his impressions from coming into contact with the poetry of Roger Waters. On the right side, there is a half-whitewashed brick wall with the red eye of a window. On the left side are drop-shaped, plasmoid figures, swirling in pink, red, and lilac. Between them, right before our eyes, a road opens, paved in wooden boards, leading into the endless deep perspective of the dark universe––like a metaphor for the path to the self.

Akmullayev was one of the first in Almaty to present readymade sculpture objects with his series Tsvety etazhom nizhe [Flowers on the floor below]. The self-proclaimed “king of basements,” he brought underground beauty up to the exhibition space, creating a sculpture from plumbing pipes and a bouquet of metal faucets.

A favored format of the artist’s early artistic experiments was stretched-out canvases, on which, in his expressive manner, he painted mountainous landscapes, crevices and peaks, mountain rivers, or portraits of his favorite rock musicians. Also in his inimitable style were the “drop” watercolor paintings in which he created burlesque portrait images of fantastical drop-shaped bouquets, birds, and animals.

In the 1990s, the artist went through such an intense period of personal turmoil that he decided to burn his works, an act that led to his invention of a new genre, “burning painting.” He invited his friend Igor Poluyakhtov (1963–2007) to his burning performance, in order to film it.

The general public discovered the artist and man Ablikim (at that point, still Boris) Akmullayev at the explosive 1992 Zelenyj treugolnik [Green triangle] exhibition, Obratnaia storona kartiny [The back of the painting]. This was the third show to take place with the support of the patron Makhabbat Kaydarova in the Artists’ Union exhibition space.

His vibrant, expressive paintings, which seemed to be boiling on their canvases, were unlike any others in terms of their energy, emerging from his luminous and distinctive nature. A singular impulse and intuitive approach imbue everything that comes from his large, graceful, and powerful hand.

This can be seen in his painting Salamaleikum (1991), in which Akmullayev captured his balancing act between life and death. The vertically oriented canvas is split into two sections. The lower yellow section is filled with sketched details of the triumph of being—flowers scratched into the background, green foliage, and a little dove-gray river hazily running in the distance. The upper section is blood red. On its unreal background, a red mirage, we see the silhouette of a large hand drawn in silver marker, stretched out in greeting. On the wrist are three silver lines—the scars from an attempt to slit his veins. The artist paints a metaphor of life and death in its liminal state, seemingly, in his blood.

Typical subjects and themes for Akmullayev’s paintings arise from hippie culture and everything that comes with it, in trinkets and sketchbook drawings as well as real paintings on canvas. The masterpiece of his early period, painted in 1992, is called Rock-n-Yoga. In it, the artist depicts himself as a guitarist sitting in the middle of a flowering meadow. In a bright yellow sackcloth, he sits lotus style, dressed in blue jeans, with a raised hand silhouetted against the rising disc of the crimson sun, and the right side of his long, stringy hair, curls into spirals that elaborate into a fanciful vegetal pattern. In his ecstasy, this guitarist has pressed so hard on the strings while playing his blues that they’ve broken off of the fretboard. In the crimson sky, a bird has taken flight, spreading its turquoise and emerald wings. In the lower right-hand corner, we see a sign reading “OM” giving off smoke, a blessing, reminiscent of the album covers of Indian traditional musician Ravi Shankar, whose music the artist loved.

Another painting from this “red” period is Krasnyj Budda [The red Buddha], 1992, centered on the dominating red and oranges of a figure of the Buddha brightly juxtaposed against the green leaves of the bodhi tree, sitting in a lotus pose in front of a flower. Both of these paintings were created during the flourishing of the Green Triangle collective.

Here is what his ideological comrade-in-arms from Green Triangle, the equally famous Kazakh artist and poet Saule Suleimenova (b. 1970), has to say about him. “Bor’ka is a cypress. There are very few people like him. He’s like the entire trunk of a tree that life may try to deform, but the trunk is strong enough that it won't give. And all of his art and relationship to life is wholly and indivisibly interrelated. His paintings are so red and passionate; he truly has the spirit of a revolutionary. He’s essentially a hero. He needed to be in an extreme situation all the time.”

The artist had a renaissance at the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s. The peak of this era were his new abstract landscapes including the diptych Kitajskie sny [Chinese dreams] (2008), Pkahtanie molochnogo okeana [The churning of the ocean of milk] (1999), as well as a series of round canvases stretched onto metal hoops.

His acute fauvist period, characterized by works dominated by the color red from his Triangle days, was followed by the master’s works being in a chiefly peaceful and contemplative light emerald-green palette with abstract landscape themes in these roundels, including Nezhnost’ [Tenderness] (2000), Sinii pereval [The Blue Mountain Pass] (2003), Kamennoe napadenie na nebo [The Stones Attack the Sky] (2003), Tantsy na ulitsakh [Dances in the Street] (2003), and Stremitel’noe Beloe [Rapid White] (2003).

The greatest achievement of the artist’s paintings was the way in which they captured his journeys into different portals of multidimensional reality. These painterly dives into the depths of his subconscious reflect the sensory experience, bringing it to light in the colors of the world. Also impressive is the liberty that he takes with color combinations, breaking the rules of the usual canons and standards. He plays with texture, form, and color, his expression in highly dimensional brushstrokes contrasting with smooth surfaces, polished or textured with a palette knife. Childlike directness and sensual eroticism ooze out of his many abstractions.

As a video artist, Akmullayev made works including Uznik-Pushkin remix (2001), Asian Route (2000), Video-lande, The Blinde-Breigel remix (2006), and I’me a freude, testaments to his love of nature, hunger for freedom, and experiments in self-knowledge. He formulated his relationship to art: “I believe that if a thinking creative person has something to say, it doesn’t matter what he has at hand, whether it be paints and a brush or words, or a camera, or a drum, scraps of paper or a canvas, fogged glass or sand on a lakeshore. The signal emerging from the depths suddenly desires to come out and takes on a form! The craft is in not missing the moment. Because everything around us is a miracle created by the Supreme Being!”

In his piece Krasnaia liubov k tiubeteikam [A red passion for tubeteikas], created and exhibited at his solo show at the Almaty Central Exhibition Hall in 2019, Akmullayev once again paid tribute to the universal and hippie ideas and ideals of love, brotherhood, and compassion for his Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz brothers in Xinjiang. On a red felted cloth, he sewed the tubeteikas (Turkic caps) of those three nations, framing them in small twigs, for the people who live in the Uyghur Xinjiang, in the form of the word love.

Zitta Sultanbaeva

Translated from Russian by Bela Shayevich

Photo portrait: Ablikim Akmullayev, 2003. Photo by Arman Berdalin. Courtesy ZITABL

Notes:

1. Troitsky, Artemy. Subkultura: Stories of Youth and Resistance in Russia, 1815–2017. London: The New Social; Manchester: HOME, 2017.