Almagul Menlibayeva provides the instruments to reconstruct the world as it grapples with the complex dialogue with the New Global Order.
Almagul Menlibayeva is a monumental artist. Born in Kazakhstan, she is one of the most prominent and well-known contemporary artists representing the whole region of Central Asia. The vast region of Central Asia echoes in her works, where she is not bound to borders but instead follows the flows of rivers, explores the bottom of the devastated Aral Sea, or the unique landscapes of the Lake Balkhash to construct an alternative version of local spaces and cosmologies. Menlibayeva is a virtuoso transmitter of different knowledges, ideas, and concepts that travel across time, space, and languages. She is able to recover and reconstruct histories and ideas that survived ecological disasters and colonialism. In this process, Menlibayeva becomes an archivist of the contemporary, where centuries-long knowledges and rituals are performed anew and where the spirits of the ancestors revive in the bodies of modern-day women.
Nature – rivers, landscapes, salty deserts, Caspian shores, mythical islands, and most importantly, the steppe – become active agents and co-authors of Menlibayeva’s oeuvre. Her famous video art works invite the viewers to a world where humans mix with mythical figures, peri, fairies, and enchanting sirens, and where the steppe itself is speaking, singing, and actively participating in the creation of the narrative. Menlibayeva creates her own special visual and artistic language with trademark imagery and coined concepts like romantic punk shamanism. Steppe becomes the body of female figures, half-human, half-animals.
Punk shamanism, coined by Menlibayeva in the 1990s, opened the space for experiments and self-reflections about Central Asian subjectivity and identity in contemporary art. It inspired a series of transcendental works and at least three generations of artists that continue to explore, critique, and rethink the painful legacies of the Soviet and imperial collapse. Punk shamanism offers us a magical world of forgotten Gods, forbidden Tengriist rituals, and sounds and textures of the Steppe that one can feel through her video art narratives. In this magical world of forgotten symbols and knowledge, the figure of the new shaman – or the decolonised shaman – emerges, offering new horizons for reconstructing selfhood.
Another trademark of her work is the complex and layered temporality and spatiality, where the two often melt into one another. Future and Past represent one thing in a mythical transformation. Steppe becomes eternal, futuristic, and at the same time an endless archive of the past. It holds the secrets of seven ancestral mothers and speaks the language many in Central Asia have forgotten. Seas, rivers, and lakes speak, dance, and sing futuristic songs and produce music that is not yet known to our ears in contemporary time. We attune to these rhythms where history is moulded into the futuristic narrative, and art itself becomes a shamanistic figure that navigates between different temporalities and across different spaces. Almagul Menlibayeva is a master of these narratives and moves across her own layered temporalities with ease, inviting the viewer to do the same. One moment you feel like you are peeking into an ancient times ritual, in another, you are suddenly transported to the unknown future, and minutes later, time itself stops being the rigidly defined compass. Menlibayeva’s art asks you to immerse yourself in this state of floating without catching on to the known signifiers. Whether you are familiar with Central Asia or not, the world of Menlibayeva’s art and artistic practices will open up new horizons for you.
Spatiality merges with ecology and the challenging legacy of ecological crises and its aftermath. Here, history about mythical steppe nomads who appear as four-legged Centaurs in Greek mythologies merges with the detrimental ecological aftermaths of the nuclear testing sites and technogenic catastrophe that cause severe environmental harm. Menlibayeva rethinks this link between temporalities and catastrophes by focusing on alternative imaginations of what it means and how people in Central Asia can survive these aftermaths. Menlibayeva’s outlook is hopeful, not entirely apocalyptic or pessimistic. In the end, there is a way out, there is a way to find the new sea, to regenerate the steppe, to find new ways of livelihood.
Follow Almagul Menlibayeva’s works for fascinating storytelling, immerse yourself in the world of the mythical yet familiar narratives and plots, allow your imagination to rummage freely across the spaces and spatiality she proposes. One of Menlibayeva’s talents is working through a variety of different mediums – from video art to cyber-textile, sound, photography, paintings, and textiles. Trained at the Academy of Art and Theatre, Almagul Menlibayeva worked a lot with material and textile in the beginning of her career, making now legendary felt tekemet artworks.
The material and textual exploration of the medium led her to explore other formats and materialities. Throughout her career, she was able to construct and map out what some scholars of her work call ‘geo-body storytelling’. Geo-body storytelling is where geographical, spatial, and bodily narratives blend into one story construction. Through this geo-body praxis, Menlibayeva explores the trauma of coloniality by intertwining people’s embodied memories with the body of the Steppe and the body of the absent sea, referring to her works on both the Aral Sea and Lake Balkhash, destroyed and damaged, respectively, by Soviet modernisation experiments. Menlibayeva restores the agency of place and people by centring these histories and offering collective bodily and spatial storytelling. In her most recent works, like the cyber-textile installation Mother Water Gulbibi Balkhash, she overlays complex ecological, material, post-colonial, geopolitical narratives with the traditional textile, ornamentation, and tapestry and connects it to the embodied experience of people who live through these transformations and narratives.
The complexity of this tapestry allows Almagul Menlibayeva to move freely from one medium to another and offer a diverse, creative geopolitical narrative of Eurasia. Not Eurasia bound to colonial tropes or Eurasia that is divided like a trophy pie, but Eurasia that belongs to itself and its inhabitants – those who are not divided by the Caspian Sea but are united by its livelihood. We might speak different languages on different shores of the Sea, but it doesn’t mean that we cannot understand each other or the similar points of the horizons, vistas and spatial knowledge. The environment, shared history and shared culture shape the commonalities of people and communities who live in this vast region. In her works, Almagul Menlibayeva masterfully proposes to rethink and redraw the dominant frameworks of geopolitics and transform them into more expandable, liberated, democratic and pluralistic versions of embodied knowledge, personal and shared histories of inhabitants of these places as well as alternative environmental histories of the space itself.
Step into this world Menlibayeva’s works invite you to and tune in to the stories of the women from the Pyatigorsk islands in the middle of the Caspian Sea, hear the whispers of the crude oil, learn from the Cyber Queens and get to know Mother Water Gulbibi Balkhash from the unique Lake Balkhash where salty and fresh water co-exist on two different shores of the lake and do not mix. Open up new perspectives on geopolitics of the Eurasian continent and get inspired by the mythologies and the alternative cosmos Almagul Menlibayeva proposes.
