Saule Suleimenova

Saule Suleimenova’s Безысходный туман [Impenetrable Fog] (1988, ZAM, 2000.0753), which she painted when she was eighteen and which is now in the Zimmerli Art Museum’s collection, is very tempting to correlate with the general mood of despair that took hold in Kazakhstan in the aftermath of the 1986 anti-Soviet students’ protest in Alma-Ata’s Brezhnev Square, which was harshly put down by the authorities. But for such a young artist, the hopelessness of the painting would have more likely been inspired by her personal life than by a major political event. Either way, the inscription of the title, in the shaky lettering that so clearly stands out at the bottom of the canvas, is like a tottering, uncentered foundation for the general mood of psychological darkness that slowly rises up the painting. The vertical composition, densely filled in with dirty blues, grays, and black, is broken up at the top with the pale halo of the barely visible moon. A sense of primal terror before the imminent future is palpable.

Exactly thirty-five years later, Suleimenova painted Tuman. Kandy kantar [Fog: Bloody January] (2023), about the government shooting at anti-authoritarian protesters on the same square in Almaty in 2022. Over the course of these thirty-five years, Suleimenova has become a major artist who has shown her work in Venice, across the European capitals, at biennales in Sharjah (UAE), Moscow (Russia), and Lahore (Pakistan), and at Manifesta 11 in Zurich—in other words, she is among a small handful of artists who have broken through the centuries-long cultural isolation of Kazakhstan.

In her early years, she was a member of the Kazakhstan’s first unofficial art collective, Zelenyi treugol’nik [Green triangle], teaching herself how to paint while completing her studies at the Kazakh Academy of Architecture. Her early still lifes, city scenes, and landscapes already attest to her exceptional sense of color. The meaty layers of brushstrokes miraculously add up to an expressive and vivid mass. Over time, she became interested in portraiture, which inspired a series of exhibitions called I’m Kazakh, simply asserting the existence of this nation on earth. The title was taken from graffiti Suleimenova spotted on the side of a building in Almaty. But everything happens for a reason, and in the 2000s, when working on her next series, she was no longer painting on canvas but on vinyl sheeting printed with photographs of city walls. Against the background of these walls, Suleimenova depicted half figures most often dressed in traditional clothing—women, old men, horsemen, brides, children. This series, Казахская хроника [Kazakhskaia khronika; Kazakh Chronicle], tells the story of the emergence of urbanism in Kazakhstan, the land of the nomads and of the Great Steppe. The mottled, graffiti- and water-stained walls and the picturesque portraits exist in parallel worlds, sovereign from one another. The juxtaposition of the urban background and traditional characters from the steppe emphasizes the differences in the two ways of life while considering the meaning of origins, roots, and other primordialisms.

Suleimenova continued to use photographic prints on printable fabric surfaces as canvases for her portraits in the 2014 series AstanaLine, created in response to the new Kazakh capital, Astana (formerly Tselinograd), being built in the middle of the bare steppe for a second time. Unlike the Kazakhskaia khronika, which consider Almaty, the Astana paintings have depth and perspective because the background images are of the city’s pompous new skyscrapers, shot from below. Scale and number play a big role here—the series consists of fourteen canvases that are 130 by 180 centimeters each, reflecting the imperial ambitions of the construction project itself. Among the figures with legible ethnic and historical characteristics, there are now more contemporaries: laborers, janitors, construction workers—those who create Astana with their bare hands rather than with their decrees and bureaucratic protocols. These figures occasionally huddle in tight groups near building walls, their posing creating a socioeconomic contrast; or they are seen in perspective, working on the steppe, with unexpected futuristic skyscrapers in the background.

Suleimenova began experimenting with her “cellophane” painting (tsellofanovaya zhivopis’) in 2015 and 2016, transitioning from the occasional use of collage methods within her paintings to outright collage. She learned how to heat-seal plastic grocery bags, melting them into large sheets of polyethylene. She was inspired to start using plastic by the obvious state of the environment and the trash-littered Kazakh mountains and steppes, covered in traces of modern consumerism. Her first foray into this medium entailed creating paradoxically beautiful plastic landscapes that strikingly depicted the natural wonder of her homeland. “On the one hand, in Suleimenova’s new series, plastic takes on the role of paint, rendering the image in legible and precise combinations or contrasting areas of color, tone, shade, and undertone. On the other hand, there is a substitution: the classical landscape, crafted from thin plastic bags, breaks apart into the fragments of words, letters, and sometimes entire advertising slogans and logos and brands. The words and their parts are actually easy to read: they are the symbols of the contemporary plastic civilization.” [1]

Her show Somewhere in the Great Steppe (Almaty, 2017) signaled a more probing period in her work, marked not only by new techniques, but by an intensification of the critical overtones that had still resembled mere irony in AstanaLine. Despite the incredible beauty of the latter series’s landscapes, the certainty of ecological catastrophe had now forced the artist not only to reevaluate present-day social conditions, but also to seek out the causes of people’s indifference to their environment. This thinking was the origin of her triptych TSON (Tsentr obsluzhivaniia naseleniia) [PSC Public Service Center] (2017). This is another example of her “cellophane” painting, but this time, Suleimenova used plastic bags exclusively. For those unaccustomed to the endless lines of the Soviet era, the triptych’s images of overcrowding may come as a shock. The sense of humiliation and forced submission is emphasized by the four police hats in the background.

Once you begin asking why, it’s hard to stop. Where does all of this endless patience, obedience, ability to withstand humiliation come from? The answers must reside in the nation’s history, its colonial past. In her series Остаточная память [Ostatochnaia pamiat’, Residual Memory] (2019), Suleimenova uses mostly black and white plastic bags, and photography is no longer a background but a central element. “[The series] is about the decolonization of collective and personal memories through communal guilt and mourning rituals. Thus, Исход казахов [The Exodus of the Kazakhs] makes such a strong impression. The reproduction of an old photograph of starving people, wandering in hopes of surviving, exiled from their homes by collectivization, is made out of plastic packaging for tea, chocolate, and bread, as though the artist is paying her respects to the victims of mass famine by symbolically giving them the food they were denied, while at the same time making the point that the empty wrappers cannot return their ruined lives.” [2] Two other pieces from the series are about those 1986 anti-Soviet protests on Alma-Ata’s Brezhnev Square. These also use documentary photographs, the first one showing students locking arms during the protest, and the second one, 1986. Второй день [1986. Vtoroi den, 1986. Day two], showing the bodies of beaten-up protesters piled in a snowy ditch.

These recollections are not the most comfortable thing for the current Kazakh authorities ever since the events of 2011, when protesting oil and gas workers, whose labor feeds the whole country, were shot at in Zhanaozen. Despite the government’s disapproval, many artists responded to these events, which can no longer be explained as the result of colonialism, since Kazakhstan was independent. These artists included Erbossyn Meldibekov (b. 1964), Askhat Akhmediarov (b.1965), and Suleimenova. In their cases, a simple statement of the facts was tantamount to criticism.

On a foggy day, January 5, 2022, in the words of the president of Kazakhstan, Almaty “was attacked by 20,000 terrorists.” The police abandoned their posts, there was looting, and the crowd in the square was shot at. That year, Suleimenova made an enormous plastic painting called Nebo nad Almaty. Kandy Kantar [The sky over Almaty. Bloody January]. The massive piece (4.5 × 10.8 m), which appears to be veiled in a red smoke, makes the viewer feel like they are right there on the square. In order to achieve the smoke effect, the artist switched out the Kazkah-blue color of the official banners on the buildings surrounding the square, covering discrete architectural details in red plastic. The second painting depicting the same scene, Tuman. Kandy kantar [Fog. Bloody January]) (2023), is almost monochromatic, rendered in gray tones. The composition is no longer symmetrical—the stele of the monument is placed off-center, turning the symbol of independence into a banal part of the city landscape. The foreground and focus are the protesters stretched out across the entire width of the painting, holding a banner reading «Мы простые люди. Мы не террористы» [We are regular people. We are not terrorists].

The foggy indeterminacy of Suleimenova’s youth has finally been transformed into the solid conviction, fantastical diligence, inescapable artistic passion, and irrefutable artistic mastery of her maturity.

Valeria Ibraeva

Translated from Russian by Bela Shayevich

Photo portrait of the artist by Suinbike Suleimenova

Notes:

1. Ibraeva, Valeria. Somewhere in the Great Steppe, exh. cat., introductory article. Almaty: Office solution, 2017: 4–5.

2. Tlostanova, Madina. “Chto znachit byt kazakhom?” [What does it mean to be Kazakh?]. In Dekolonialnost znania, bytia i oschuschenia [Decoloniality of being, knowing and feeling]. Almaty: Center for Contemporary Culture “Tselinny,” 2020: 142–43.