To everything, spurn, spurn, spurn
Curated by Slavs and Tatars and Asya Yaghmurian, the exhibition presents works by nine artists exploring notions of disdain and contempt. To spurn comes from the verb to strike back, to kick back: revealing our physiological and emotional urge to reject. It also functions as self-protection, a softer mode of refusal that sets boundaries while leaving room for care.
The opening salvo of scorn, though, is an offering, of some sort: we live in times of plenitude, be they visual, discursive, or informational. And yet, we are surrounded by shortages everywhere: empathetic, humanitarian, educational, cultural, economic and environmental. In this dissonance, contemporary culture offers itself as a space and a language for spurning: a way to set limits, refuse harmful scripts, and to leave room for care.
Revisiting the famous 1965 song by The Byrds, “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season),” newly commissioned paintings, watercolours, and sculptures ask what it means to kick back, whether at a lover or an epoch. The song adapts and sets to music a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes, (Old Testament, 3:1–8) that talks about the human experiences as paired opposites: birth and death, building and breaking, war and peace, and suggests there is a time for every human activity. But the refrain “Turn! Turn! Turn!” And the closing plea “…t’s not too late” added by the Byrds tilt the question towards agency and hope, reminding us that refusal, repair, and renewal each have their season. Against that backdrop of turning seasons and turning to disdain, the artists ask What is a season of contempt, when refusal is necessary and when repair becomes possible.
All the artists hail from Central Asia and the Caucasus, in the widest geographic and affective sense, be they diasporic or local. Akhmat Bikanov’s watercolours delicately whisper desire as an eruptive force of portraiture while Javkhlan Ariunbold’s effervescent paintings combine ancient Mongol motifs of death and wisdom with contemporary anthropocene technology. Together, the voices in the exhibition draw a through-line of refusal, repair, and renewal. The region is enjoying particular interest of late within the cultural fields, with the imminent début of the BukharaBiennial and the opening of two new arts institutions in Almaty: the Almaty Museum of Art and Tselinny Center for Contemporary Culture. The exhibition at Artwin offers a further consideration of this milieu through the voices of both emerging and established artists.
Artists:
• Javkhlan Ariunbold, 1990, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
• Akhmat Bikanov, 1996, Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, Russia
• Bakhyt Bubikanova, 1985–2023, Aktobe/Astana, Kazakhstan
• Saule Dyussenbina, 1971, Karaganda, Kazakhstan
• Nuriia Nurgalieva, 1998, Naberezhnye Chelny, Republic of Tatarstan, Russia
• Yuma Radne, 2001, Ulan-Ude, Buryad-Mongolia, Russia
• Shamil Shaaev, 1988, Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia
• Slavs and Tatars, 2006
• Alexander Volkov, 1886–1957, Fergana/Tashkent, Uzbekistan
