Barbarism as Resistance Strategy in the Early Post-Soviet Contemporary Art of Kazakhstan

• In Event: Daring, Subversive, Transgressive: Strategies of Self-Representation in 20th-Century Central Asian Art

Abstract

In the early post-Soviet period, a Kazakhstani contemporary artist Kanat Ibragimov was mostly known for his provocative performance work. After co-founding, in 1994, a collective called Kokserek (Kazakh for ‘Grey Fierce’ from the eponymous story by the writer Mukhtar Auezov), he went on to create pieces that would shock audiences with their unexpected resort to violence and the use of direct action. In these artworks, Ibragimov would do things that would be considered morally questionable, like dismembering or sacrificing animals in exhibition spaces and drinking their blood afterward. All this was to attain one precise goal: to be perceived by the public as a barbarian. While the savage that Ibragimov performed was primarily important to demonstrate that the imposed Soviet modernist project had failed to ‘domesticate’ him, the ‘self-barbarisation’ as deployed by the artist was also an effective strategy of response towards the rapidly nationalizing and slowly democratizing Kazakhstani regime of the 1990s. Following the French writer of Algerian descent Louisa Yousfi in her argumentation in ‘defence of barbarism’ and drawing on the analysis of both the artworks by Ibragimov and the early post-Soviet art press, my paper will seek to understand the ‘barbarism discourse’ that the artist developed as a means to resist cultural hegemonies.

Author

• Dilda Ramazan, Sorbonne U (France)