From July 9 to August 5, the NUR ALEM Future Energy Museum hosts the exhibition “The Life of Things”, which includes works of famous Kazakhstani artists created over the past 30 years. The organizers of the exhibition are NC QazExpoCongress JSC and the Eurasian Cultural Alliance NGO.
The exhibition, the main theme of which is ecology, presents paintings made from unusual materials – recycled rubber, plastic bags, newspaper clippings, stickers from under lemonade bottles, empty packs of medicines, toys and much more. All this is the evidence of the artists’ search for a new aesthetic in the short-lived things that have flooded the planet and without which the life of modern people is unthinkable today.
“This exhibition is about how modern life and materials affect art. Today we are surrounded by plastic, rubber, metal, and all this takes on a second life in the works of artists. Here we want to reflect together with the visitors on how our attitude to things is changing and will affect our daily life and the future”, says Olga Veselova, curator of the Eurasian Cultural Alliance.
“We came up with the idea to think about ecology and expand this topic through non-standard techniques, to think about how materials determine an artistic statement. We have collected works of artists from the mid-90s to the 2020s who worked with some non-academic materials, moved away from such canons as bronze, marble, oil with acrylic and invented something of their own,” explains curator Vladislav Sludsky.
Among the works, you can see a mountain landscape and a triptych with Kazakh women made of cellophane bags on a sheet of polycarbonate, as well as an image of the Abai family from plastic bags on a sheet of plastic. The author is Saule Suleimenova.
“Almost under every kitchen sink in any house, mountains of packages in a package accumulate, and since 2014 Suleimenova has been transferring these “costs” of everyday life to the space of modern art. Such a gesture could have several interpretations: from a purely ecological one – the artist will save a certain conditional world from garbage – to a more social one, in which garbage, as it were, ceases to be a problem and becomes an integral part of our cultural code,” says the description of S. Suleimenova’s works.
There is also a picture of one of the brightest representatives of Kazakh contemporary art Moldakul Narymbetov: this is the “Three Biys” – a work made with acrylic and recycled tires. The artist worked a lot with car tires, between 2000 and 2012. He created about 100 works of them.
“Of course, this is a very complex and toxic material, from which it is not very easy to perform artistic plastic. Narymbetov most often made sculptures out of tires, 8 of them were included in the permanent collection of the Tretyakov Gallery. In the painting “Three Biys”, the artist practically enters the territory of sculpture, this is a very textural, very fleshy and to some extent masculine work that conquers 3D space,” V. Sludsky describes.
Overall, the exhibition “Life of Things” has more than 30 works by such artists as Said Atabekov, Alpamys Batyr, Kuanysh Bazargaliyev, Violetta Bogdanova, Elena and Viktor Vorobyov, Katya Kan, Moldakul Narymbetov, Saule Suleimenova, Georgy Tryakin-Bukharov, Arystanbek Shalbayev, Alexey Shindin, Zoya Falkova.
This is a kind of archive of the cultural cross-section of time and symbols of the past era. Each of the exhibits of the exhibition is a work of art that conveys the subtleties of the era and the trends of its time, reflecting the bold creative vision of the author and his original artistic ideas.
The choice of the location for the exhibition is not accidental and is especially important in the context of the mission of the NUR ALEM Future Energy Museum, created to broadcast ideas for improving the environment, including reducing harmful emissions into the atmosphere, switching to renewable energy sources and reducing the hydrocarbon footprint in Kazakhstan and the world.
Link to the material: https://www.nur.kz/kaleidoscope/1921923-kak-plastik-i-rezina-obretayut-vtoruyu-zhizn-v-nur-alem-otkrylas-ystavka-zhizn-veschey/
