The artistic union of Galim Madanov and Zauresh Terekbay represents a rare example of a long-term, internally cohesive collaborative practice in which art developed not as a series of discrete projects, but as a continuous process of shared thinking. Their duet emerged at the intersection of personal life and professional dialogue and, over the course of decades, remained a space of constant experimentation, rethinking, and the shifting of boundaries.

The project “Transgression”, first presented twenty years ago, became one of the key milestones of this joint practice. Its very title articulated the principle underlying their method: transgression as the crossing of genres, images, temporal layers, and cultural codes. What came into focus was not a fixed meaning, but movement between meanings like a transitional state in which familiar forms lose their certainty and are reassembled anew.

Working with collage as their primary artistic language, Madanov and Terekbay constructed a complex visual fabric in which fragments of everyday life, mass culture, personal memory, and art history collide and overlap. Their works do not aspire to a unified narrative; rather, they register ruptures, disjunctions, and gaps, the very spaces in which the experience of contemporary life becomes visible. Kazakhstan appears in these works not as a completed identity, but as a field of ongoing construction and revision.

Twenty years after its first presentation, “Transgression” is read differently. What was once perceived as an artistic gesture now appears as an uncannily precise anticipation of the world’s condition: fragmented, multilayered, saturated with images and meanings. The collage method chosen by the artists reveals itself not merely as a formal device, but as a mode of thinking: one attuned to an era of acceleration, the loss of stable reference points, and the constant intersection of the private and the public.

The recent passing of Galim Madanov adds an additional dimension to this work. His absence does not turn the collaborative practice into a closed chapter, but shifts it into a space of memory and continuation. Within the context of the exhibition, Transgression resonates not as an archival project, but as a living statement, in which the artistic dialogue continues beyond the physical presence of one of its authors. The story of Madanov and Terekbay is a story of a union in which art becomes a way of jointly inhabiting time. Their duet demonstrates that transgression is possible not only within artistic strategies, but also within the very model of partnership as the capacity to remain in motion, to resist final fixations, and to leave space open for continuation.

In recent years, Alibay and Saule Bapanov have worked together less frequently. However, since the late 1980s, two works preserved in the artists’ collection largely anticipate the directions of their individual practices. Saule more often works in the field of fashion and clothing design, while Alibay primarily turns to tapestry, although both continue to engage with painting. Felt, wool, fabric, silk, and textiles constitute points of intersection in their interests, and these materials for a long time remained on the periphery of attention or were undervalued within the canonical history of art.

Today, functional, organic, textile, and other materials that fall outside the academic line of twentieth century art, as well as earlier periods, increasingly appear at the center of major institutional and gallery exhibitions. In this sense, the Bapanovs were ahead of their time. They were not constrained by methods historically associated with craft traditions and applied art practices. In the narratives shaping the compositions of their works, viewers often encounter legends, the mythology of Tengriism, traditional ornament, and the visual vocabulary of both nomadic and urban cultures of Kazakhstan.

The titles of the Bapanovs’ works, both joint and individual, such as “Frescoes of the Nomads”, “Patterns of the Universe”, and “Daughters of the Nomads”, immediately set a broad philosophical horizon. They reveal an interest in the structure of the world, memory, and the place of the human being within cultural and historical continuity. Turning to simple, everyday materials and techniques of manual labor such as felt, wool, fabric, silk, and textiles, the artists use them not as neutral carriers of form but as active media of thought. Through these materials unfold reflections on nature and cosmology, on the role of the human in the contemporary world, and on the place of national aesthetics within the context of contemporary art.

In Alibay’s artistic language, one can discern a metamodernist logic. He does not abandon the significance of form as an autonomous value, yet freely moves between sincerity and reflection, between the elevated and the everyday, between devotion to the image and awareness of its conditional nature. Saule, while close to this approach, works in a softer and more associative manner. In her practice, a line of personal and intimate poetics, historical memory, and female experience is more distinctly articulated. If rigid distinctions are set aside, both artists exist in harmony with modernism as well as with prehistorical forms of art that partially gave rise to it.

The story of Gulfairus Ismailova and Evgeny Sidorkin is one of the most cohesive and harmonious narratives in the history of twentieth-century Kazakhstani art. It is a union in which the personal, the professional, and the worldview-based did not exist as separate spheres, but rather as a single, mutually sustaining whole.

They came from different national and cultural traditions, yet it was precisely this difference that allowed their shared artistic language to emerge. Ismailova worked primarily in painting and scenography, developing a large-scale, imagistic, and theatrical vision in which Kazakh history, folklore, and modernity merged into a unified visual myth. Sidorkin, by contrast, remained committed to graphic art, restrained, precise, and grounded in observation and inner concentration. His line was consistently attentive to the human figure, to gesture, to state of being, and to subtle psychological tension.

Their artistic practices did not dissolve into one another, but existed in continuous dialogue. Ismailova’s painting gravitated toward the space of the stage, toward the image as an event, while Sidorkin’s graphic works captured moments, glances, and pauses. Together, they formed a rare balance between scale and intimacy, between myth and observation. In this sense, their union can be understood as a meeting of two optics: the theatrical and the камерная, the symbolic and the documentary.

A less obvious, yet crucial aspect of their interaction lies in the theme of portraiture and mutual presence within each other’s work. Sidorkin repeatedly turned to the image of Gulfairus, creating not so much representations of a muse as a chronicle of closeness and shared lived time. These works register not external beauty, but a state: calm, dignity, and inner composure. In Ismailova’s painting, personal experience never became confessional, yet it remained present as a foundation of stability, as a point of inner support within a broader cultural narrative.

Their partnership took shape in an era when the artist was assigned a clearly defined social role and art was viewed as part of a large state apparatus. Against this backdrop, their ability to preserve the autonomy of their inner world without severing ties to tradition or institution appears especially significant. They did not oppose the personal to the official, but carefully wove the two together, demonstrating that the sustainability of an artistic path is possible precisely through partnership, trust, and mutual respect for difference.

The work “Self-Portrait in an Eastern Style” reprises a version of a similar piece from 2004, which emerged either from a domestic or a performative series of photographs of the artists and their friends after a visit to a bathhouse. In general, the Vorobyovs transform lived experience into artistic material, where the boundary between the “high” and the everyday is drawn almost imperceptibly.

The subjects of Elena Vorobyova’s paintings from that period are objects of everyday life or, as she puts it, “carriers of life energy”: kettles, bananas, flies, or a light bulb, whose very glow evokes an intimate space of trust, something deeply personal and at the same time ordinary, unusual for the bright halls of major museums. Artists whose careers unfolded during the era of early independence and who were limited in terms of means of production may have become strong conceptualists also because art had to be invented literally from nothing. This clearly distinguishes the artistic strategies of Central Asia in the 1990s from the practices of communities where, at the same time, the full range of materials, production facilities, and, most importantly, an ecosystem and capital capable of supporting and financing them were readily available.

In the rapid and chaotic movement of change, the Vorobyovs register the importance of everyday details. The kitchen becomes an anchor, tea turns into a ritual, and the domestic space becomes a place where people meet, talk, and reflect. The artists have repeatedly spoken about the remarkable mutual understanding that exists within their partnership and about the importance of being in constant dialogue with someone close. A significant part of the works created over nearly three decades of the Vorobyovs’ joint practice tells the viewer small, private stories, yet at the same time sounds like a powerful social and political statement.

The Vorobyovs’ works have been exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial, the Venice Biennale, and the Sydney Biennale. Their projects have been presented at M HKA in Antwerp, MACBA in Barcelona, and other institutions. Elena and Viktor Vorobyov became the first artists from Kazakhstan whose work The Artist Is Sleeping was shown in the main pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2017 at the invitation of curator Christine Macel and was subsequently acquired for the collection of the Centre Pompidou.

Zhenya Baigali and Sayan Baigaliyev are a young family. Both artists work in a shared studio, while outside of it they build a common everyday life and raise a young son. This arrangement involves a number of challenges: how to avoid blending artistic languages while sharing the same space, how to divide the studio, and how to distribute time between caring for a child and developing a career, especially given that both prefer to work at night.

A recent solo exhibition by Sayan Baigaliyev at the A. Kasteev State Museum of Arts was dedicated to the experience of family life in a small apartment during the pandemic. In his painting, objects often become the main protagonists. The artist redraws familiar standardized spaces, distorts geometry, and constructs complex perspectives of corridors and kitchens, tables and household elements, exploring how the sense of home, warmth, and fatigue changes when the same situation is replayed again and again. Sayan’s works convincingly demonstrate how everyday routine, repeated rituals, and confined interiors give rise to a complex, emotionally charged reflection on home, memory, and the distribution of roles within the family. His method can be described as spatial and situational. The scene is constructed first, and emotions emerge from it through perspective, light, the play of shadows, and the balance of cold and warmth in color.

Zhenya Baigali’s artistic method, by contrast, gravitates toward expressive figuration. Her focus is on the body, the face, emotions, inner states, and psychological experiences, even when working with still lifes or landscapes. Evgeniya builds her works around the human condition, which is conveyed through a gaze, a tilt of the head, corporeality, the outline of mountains, or an eggshell surrounding a peeled egg. The background in her works does not become an independent protagonist but serves to sustain the overall emotional tension, whereas in Sayan’s work the material environment acts as a fully fledged participant in the artistic statement.

What unites these two artists is a careful, attentive, and trusting relationship with the surrounding world, as well as an interest in everyday life as a space of feeling, vulnerability, and intimacy. In their practices, family life does not function as an illustration or a subject in itself but becomes a living process within which a language is formed, images emerge, and a conversation about the experience of shared existence continues.

Maria Vilkoviskaya and Rufiya Dzhenrbekova are an artistic duo working at the intersection of music, video art, poetry, and visual practices. Together they develop the Creole Center, an imagined virtual cultural institution conceived as a space without geographic or disciplinary boundaries. This project functions as a cosmopolitan and inclusive platform that proposes an alternative vision of a shared world through an intersectional sensibility combining postcolonial, transmodern, ecological, and feminist perspectives.

Their shared history did not begin as a family partnership but grew out of a mutual immersion in an informal cultural environment that was nocturnal, experimental, and marginal in relation to official institutions. This was a space of underground parties, music and art scenes, intellectual and bodily experience, where art, sound, conversation, and risk existed as a single continuum. It was precisely within this environment, distant from stable forms and fixed social roles, that their first experience of living through art together emerged.

Over time, the couple’s personal experience underwent a profound transformation connected to the rethinking of identity and embodiment, lived through partnership and sustained dialogue. This experience does not become a direct narrative in their works but shapes a specific artistic perspective focused on processes of becoming, vulnerability, the language of self-naming, and forms of existence outside rigidly defined social roles. In their practice, biography does not turn into a declaration but becomes a source of sensitivity and internal knowledge.

Maria Vilkoviskaya also works actively as a poet. Text and sound occupy a place in the duo’s practice that is no less significant than the visual image. Both artists consistently explore themes of identity, belonging, memory, and exclusion, engaging in a broader conversation on decolonial and queer sensibility, understood not as an ideological position but as a mode of attentive and responsible engagement with the world.

Projects by Maria Vilkoviskaya and Rufiya Dzhenrbekova include video art, performative and sound works, installations, as well as curatorial and educational initiatives. The Creole Center functions as a para-institution that simultaneously imitates and critiques established cultural structures, proposing instead a flexible model of an artistic community based on mutual support and interdisciplinary dialogue. Their works and projects have been presented within international programs and research platforms, including the performative and sound program Lecture on John Cage in Almaty, the exhibition project “I – Iskusstvo (Art). F – Feminism. An Actual Dictionary” (Moscow), as well as the international research platform Research Catalogue, where their practice has been presented in the context of intermedia and artistic research projects.

Olesya Roskos and Ulan Dzhaparov form a partnership in which joint practice does not reduce to the format of an artistic duo in the conventional sense. Rather, it is a stable form of co-presence and mutual influence, where each retains an independent artistic language while remaining in a constant field of dialogue, support, and exchange.

Ulan Dzhaparov is an architect, artist, and curator based in Bishkek and one of the key figures of the independent art scene of Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia. By education and primary professional activity, he is an architect and the head of the MUSEUM studio, yet his artistic practice unfolds in waves through curatorial projects, artistic “forays,” performative actions, and initiatives that arise outside a rigid institutional schedule. This rhythm, alternating architectural work with periods of intense artistic activity, shaped a particular mode of thinking in which environment, gesture, and situation are as significant as the artwork itself.

Dzhaparov has curated and initiated a number of influential projects, including the exhibition “Topografica” (2015), conceived as an artistic investigation of the sociocultural landscape of Central Asia, as well as the April First competitions in Bishkek. These competitions functioned as an informal yet influential platform around which the region’s artistic community has been forming for decades.
Olesya Roskos is an artist, designer, and educator. Born and trained in Siberia, in Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk, she moved to Bishkek in the early 2000s, where her practice underwent a substantial transformation. Previously, Roskos understood herself primarily as a “2D artist” working with surface, color, and graphic form. Her immersion in the Central Asian artistic context, and above all her participation in Dzhaparov’s April First projects, became a point of radical shift for her.

The project “Teapots” marked a moment of inner rupture for Roskos. It involved a rejection of familiar form, a step into a zone of risk, and trust in the process. From that point on, her practice increasingly incorporated collage, photography, drawing, and work with everyday situations as sources of artistic material. In parallel, for many years Roskos has taught drawing, composition, and painting at Compass College, developing an intensive pedagogical practice closely connected to her own artistic research.

The artists themselves emphasize that their partnership is not a form of “shared joint production” but rather movement along parallel trajectories that periodically converge at nodal points. Such points emerge from domestic mise-en-scènes, shared walks, trips, conversations, and chance phrases, from which drawings, photo series, performative gestures, and video works grow. What matters is not to override the other’s initiative, but instead to support it, accompany it, and allow it to unfold.
An important dimension of this partnership is also family experience. The artists themselves describe their exhibition with ironic humor using the formula “1+1=3.” Their son Arsen is organically integrated into their shared artistic reality, having been present in artistic processes from early childhood as a participant, witness, and co-author. This experience expands the very notion of authorship and collaboration, shifting the focus from the finished artwork to the “submerged part of the iceberg,” namely process, environment, and the accumulation of gestures and situations.

Rustam Khalfin and Lidiya Blinova belong to the generation that laid the foundations of contemporary art in Kazakhstan long before the emergence of stable institutions, a public art scene, or even the language through which contemporary artistic practice is described today. Alongside Sergey Maslov, Saken Narynov, and Moldakul Narymbetov, they form a circle of figures without whom the development of Kazakhstani contemporary art would be unthinkable. At the same time, they belong to an earlier phase, a period of informal, almost underground artistic existence.

Khalfin was a student of Vladimir Sterligov, an avant-garde artist and theorist, and this line of artistic inheritance is essential to understanding his approach to form and space. Trained as an architect, he thought of art constructively, as a system in which gesture, object, and environment exist in constant tension. Architectural thinking in his practice was not a profession but a mode of being: under late Soviet censorship, architects enjoyed a degree of freedom that was largely unavailable to artists in the conventional sense. It is therefore no coincidence that early forms of contemporary art in Kazakhstan often emerged in private spaces like apartments and kitchens that became sites of discussion, experimentation, and unofficial exhibitions.

Lidiya Blinova was not only Khalfin’s life partner but also an independent and multifaceted figure: an artist, architect, designer, author of installations, and writer. Their shared practice unfolded not so much as a “duet” in the narrow sense, but rather as a common artistic field in which ideas, projects, and institutional gestures arose through dialogue and mutual influence. The project Puloty, realized at the end of the Soviet period, became one of the key episodes of this collaboration, an example of how artistic expression moved beyond the object to become a form of collective action and environment.

An important continuation of this logic was the founding of LOOK Gallery, one of the first spaces in Almaty to work systematically with contemporary art. The gallery became a focal point of the local art scene, a place where connections were formed, ideas discussed, and a new artistic language consolidated. In this sense, the union of Khalfin and Blinova was not only creative but also institutional: they worked not only with artworks, but with the conditions of their existence.
Their story is also significant as an example of the transmission of artistic experience. Khalfin and Blinova served as a link between generations, shaping an environment in which new alliances, dialogues, and practices could emerge. Within the context of the exhibition, this duo represents a form of partnership in which collaboration becomes a kind of infrastructure, and personal connection forms the basis for a sustainable artistic process.

The story of Khalfin and Blinova is neither a romantic myth nor a heroic legend, but a rare example of how contemporary art in Kazakhstan was formed through shared thinking, mutual support, and a consistent engagement with spaces of freedom, even where such freedom seemed, at first glance, not to exist.

The practices of Saule Suleimenova and Kuanysh Bazargaliyev are fundamentally different, and the work presented in the exhibition is their only joint piece, aside from murals. Kuanysh works with painting, yet his method goes beyond a conventional understanding of the painterly canon. He does not so much paint images as construct them, consistently inventing his own rules and technical foundations. His practice is focused on the world of objects. Series such as “Tables and Chairs”, “Shirts”, and “A House for Sale with a Telephone” are built with extreme restraint and graphic clarity, without emotional pressure, and with close attention to structure, material, and surface. The texture of his works is formed through experimental techniques, including the use of syringes, nails, and screws, which give the painting a density and corporeality that are difficult to reduce to academic models.

At the center of Saule’s artistic statement is the human being, and most often only the human being. Faces, voices, personal stories, emotions, and lived experiences dominate her work. In her practice, the artist uses a technique she developed herself known as cellophane painting, an innovative method in which the vulnerability of the material intensifies the emotional impact of the image. The piercing subject matter and a high degree of empathy have made Saule Suleimenova one of the most recognizable Kazakhstani artists on the international scene.

The point of intersection between these two artistic worlds emerges where both articulate a civic position. Themes of painful memory of the past, the search for identity, reflections on decoloniality, and the return of ethnic Kazakhs to their ancestral land are present in Saule Suleimenova’s work. For Kuanysh, the 20th century appears as an inescapable reality, a cold оболочка understood as a system of signs. He constructs series of projects as autonomous semiotic systems, working with the qoşqar müiız ornament not as a decorative motif but as a language and a structure of thought, as well as with mechanisms of visual coding of ideologies, irony, and constant internal inquiry. Within this external restraint lies a complex and carefully considered position that is no less saturated than the immediate reaction often expected from art today.

If in Saule’s practice the political manifests itself through personal stories and the tragedy of the individual, in Kuanysh’s work it appears through an expansive field of metanarratives and constructions. Their practices resemble binocular vision, where the same issue can be examined either broadly and volumetrically or closely and in detail. For both artists, the political becomes a way to record and rethink fragments of the past to which informational access emerged after Kazakhstan gained independence, and therefore the possibility of comprehension, preservation, and transmission to future generations.

In everyday life outside of art, a rare and telling dynamic exists within this partnership. Kuanysh builds their shared home with his own hands, and for him it is no difficulty to make a provisional stretcher for Saule’s new work. They raised two daughters who are also artists, Suinbike and Medina, and today they actively participate in raising their grandson. In many ways, it is Kuanysh’s ability to create a stable environment, both physical and symbolic, that becomes the foundation on which family life and artistic processes are built. One can only speculate how this multilayered and multifaceted union functions, and how they manage to align the diagonals of their roles as artists, parents, spouses, apashka and atashka (grand father and grand mother), in such an organic way that creative life within the family continues to unfold.

Sergey Maslov is considered one of the key figures of early Kazakhstani contemporary art. He is known as an artist who worked not only with painting but also with installation, objects, and texts. His practice is marked by irony toward the Soviet and post Soviet experience, myth making, an interest in esotericism, and marginal modes of existence. Maslov relies on a modernist belief in art as an autonomous language, while actively employing postmodern strategies such as play, quotation, absurd situations, narrative shifts, and work with myth. A crucial feature of his artistic thinking is his engagement with a different sense of time, not linear but multilayered, where past, present, and imagined future coexist.

Sergey Maslov met Almagul Menlibayeva in 1985, when she was fifteen years old. He was teaching painting classes, and according to the artist’s recollections, the first lesson was devoted to Surrealism. From the very beginning, these classes went beyond academic painting instruction. Maslov was interested in psychology, the unfolding of inner potential, and working with the subconscious. Alongside artistic practice within the field of Surrealism and Symbolism, they turned to various psychological exercises and tests as a way of accessing inner states and images.

Today, this story is inevitably read through the lens of new ethics and cancel culture which tends to interpret such situations through rigid and simplifying categories that do not always take into account the context of the time or the voices of the participants themselves. Within this coordinate system, Maslov’s figure can easily be reduced to a singular accusatory image, while the complexity of human relationships is pushed aside. However, this history resists such simplifications, not least because it was not a single event but a long process of shared formation. Almagul Menlibayeva emphasizes that their close personal relationship began much later, after she had turned eighteen and enrolled at an institute. This was a conscious and independent decision.

Out of the relationship between student and teacher eventually grew one of the most significant and complex stories of partnership in the art of Kazakhstan. Almagul Menlibayeva has repeatedly stressed that Maslov was an important and supportive figure for her and had a substantial influence on her personal and artistic development. At the same time, she herself became a key source of inspiration, inner dialogue, and transformation for him. Maslov repeatedly turned to her image in his works, and their relationship evolved as an example of mutual influence in which both participants changed and shaped one another. What unites them is a particular sense of time, namely the ability to think beyond the limits of the present day, to work with parallel worlds, archaeological pasts, and imagined futures, while maintaining a connection to the reality of the present.

One confirmation of this can be found in Maslov’s work Baikonur 2, created after he accompanied Almagul to the funeral of her mother in the village of Aksu Ayuly in the Karaganda region. It was then that the artist first spent the night in a real Kazakh yurt, an experience that made a strong impression on him and found expression in his artistic language. This experience became a point of convergence for personal, historical, and mythological time, a kind of rupture through which past and present begin to exist simultaneously.

Menlibayeva’s early works remained outside the public field for a long time and were unknown to a wide audience. In this respect, her biography partially echoes Maslov’s trajectory, as he was and remains a cult figure within the professional circle of contemporary art. He has a vivid, almost legendary status and is well known to curators, researchers, and artists, yet is far less recognizable to a mass audience. Both share a distance from immediate criticism and current agendas, as their interests lie in longer temporal scales.

Public recognition came to Almagul Menlibayeva earlier and along a different trajectory. She achieved broad professional visibility primarily through her work with new media, including video art, photography, and performative forms, rather than through painting in its classical sense. Her projects consistently address themes of post Soviet identity, the position of women and their pain and hopes, ecological and social trauma, and the relationship between human beings and the steppe and industrial landscape.

Umida Akhmedova and Oleg Karpov form the only artistic duo in the exhibition representing Uzbekistan. In this capacity, they are important not as an “external” perspective, but as an integral part of the shared Central Asian artistic field. For many years, the artistic communities of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have been engaged in close dialogue: artists travel to each other’s countries, participate in exhibitions, discuss common themes, and share similar experiences of living through the post-Soviet reality. The practice of Akhmedova and Karpov fits organically and naturally within this context.

Their collaborative work is centered on video as a mode of observation. In the works presented in the exhibition — “Dream of a Better Life”, “Enjoying Ourselves”, and “Being a Daughter” — the artists turn to everyday life, recording it not as a collection of individual stories, but as a reflection of large-scale, almost unreachable systems. The state, social norms, ideological and economic processes are present not directly, but as background, pressure, inertia as a tectonic movement that cannot be stopped, only felt.

These videos can be compared to a view from the window of a train moving at high speed: individual fragments of life flash by without forming a complete narrative, yet it is precisely through this fragmentation that the structure of the whole becomes visible. Music, popular tunes, fragments of news noise, domestic scenes, and everyday gestures form a dense documentary fabric in which the personal and the social are inseparable.

Akhmedova and Karpov work with documentary material while avoiding explicit commentary or moralizing. What interests them is not the event itself, but a condition as the sensation of living within large systems of power that appear at once omnipresent and unreachable. The people in these videos neither openly resist the system nor fully submit to it; they exist alongside it, adapting, observing, and at times finding brief moments of pleasure, forgetfulness, or dreaming.

Within the context of the exhibition, their duo represents a distinct type of artistic partnership, a union of observers. Their collaborative practice demonstrates how art can register large-scale processes through small gestures, without reducing complex realities to slogans or direct statements. This is an art of attentive looking, in which the document becomes a means of thinking through time, and video takes the form of a quiet yet persistent conversation about power, everyday life, and human vulnerability within expansive systems.

Muratbek Djumaliev and Gulnara Kasmalieva are one of the key artistic duos of Central Asia representing Kyrgyzstan in the exhibition. Their collaborative practice emerged in the 1990s and, over several decades, has consistently examined the social, political, and economic transformations of the region, approaching everyday life as a space where personal experience intersects with large-scale historical processes.

Living and working in Bishkek, Djumaliev and Kasmalieva became part of a dense Central Asian artistic network in which Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan have been remaining in active dialogue for many years. Their connections extend beyond exhibition projects to include sustained professional and personal relationships with artists and curators from Kazakhstan: a shared field of conversations, travels, mutual influence, and collaborative initiatives. In this sense, their presence in the exhibition is significant not as a formal act of geographic representation, but as a continuation of a shared regional artistic context.

The core media of their joint practice are video, photography, and multimedia installation. These works are built on attentive, almost contemplative observation: of the movement of people, goods, bodies, and stories; of the ways global processes such as migration, the market, state policies, and the post-Soviet legacy permeate everyday life and subtly shape its rhythms. Documentary elements in their work do not function as reportage, but rather as a method of slow, analytical looking that registers the tension between individual experience and systems of power.

An important dimension of their collaboration has been curatorial and institutional work in Bishkek and beyond. Djumaliev and Kasmalieva have curated a number of influential international contemporary art exhibitions, including “In the Shadow of Heroes” (2005), “Risk Zone” (2006), and “Boom-Boom” (co-curated with Ulan Dzhaparov, 2008), as well as the public art festivals Art Prospect Bishkek “New Breath for Green Zones!” (2017) and “Neighborhood” (2018). These projects became key platforms for artists from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

The association ArtEast, founded by the artists in 2002, along with the School of Contemporary Art project (2009–2019), played a crucial role in shaping an independent artistic environment in Kyrgyzstan. The School functioned not only as an educational platform, but also as a space for social and professional exchange, which enabled the project to be presented, among other contexts, within the framework of the Gwangju Biennale (2012).

Works by Djumaliev and Kasmalieva have been regularly presented at major international exhibitions and biennials, including the Venice Biennale (2005), the Singapore Biennale (2006), the Sharjah Biennial (2007), the Thessaloniki Biennale (2009), the Brisbane Triennial (2015), and the Aichi Triennale (2016). Their solo projects and screenings have taken place at the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Winkleman Gallery (New York), Laura Bulian Gallery (Milan), The Gube Project Space (Taipei), as well as at the Aspan Gallery in Almaty.

The duo’s artistic practice balances between the local and the global: between specific places, faces, and situations, and abstract structures of history, economy, and power that cannot be seen directly but can be felt through detail. Their works register the condition of an individual situated within processes whose scale exceeds personal experience as participant, observer, and witness at once.

Within the context of the exhibition, the duo of Djumaliev and Kasmalieva represents a form of partnership in which collaborative practice extends beyond the production of individual works and becomes a way of shaping an environment. Their art does not offer definitive answers, but creates space for reflection on the region, on time, and on how personal life is inevitably interwoven with the movement of larger systems.

The creative and family duet of Zitta Sultanbayeva and Ablikim Akmullayev is known as the art group ZITABL, an acronym formed from ZITA + ABL. Ablikim Akmullayev is an independent artist, curator, musician, and photographer, as well as a participant and leader of the underground group Green Triangle.

Zitta Sultanbayeva is an artist, art critic, and journalist, and the author of the books “Art Atmosphere of Alma-Ata” and “Scrolls of Life_EMBRYO.” For more than three decades, both through joint projects and individual practices, they have shaped the landscape of Kazakhstan’s contemporary art scene, consistently responding to shifts in historical epochs and translating their artistic practice into the language of new technologies, while situating it within global cultural processes.

The artistic practice of ZITABL encompasses a wide range of media, including installation, performance, video art, photography, painting, and drawing. The artists work freely with genres and visual codes: human figures acquire egg-shaped masks instead of faces; a wall covered with repeated instances of the word Love transforms into a message addressed to Roger Waters in England.

Despite their formal freedom, their works retain a strong thematic core: the confrontation of ideologies and conflicts of identity; the tension between global culture and local experience; the imbalance between politics, society, and art; and the tragedy of the “small individual” living under the pressure of a massive state system shaped by the forces of globalization.

The works of Zitta and Ablikum are marked by a high degree of emotional intensity combined with intellectual conceptuality. Expression, provocation, passion, vivid color, revolutionary pathos, and an existential sense of human vulnerability coexist within their practice. The combination of seemingly incompatible elements is one of the defining characteristics of both their collaborative artistic language and their family dynamic.

The international exhibition geography of ZITABL spans a wide range of institutions and contexts, including Berlin and Geneva (2002), Saint Petersburg (2002), Bonn, Stuttgart, and Paris (2003), Prague, Mexico, and Venice (2005–2007), Bishkek (2006–2009), Ganja (2007), Tbilisi (2009), Perm (2012), Strasbourg (2016), and London and Tashkent (2018).

©: Ablikim emerged as an artist within the underground, informal scene that developed in the basement of the Union of Artists, in an atmosphere of free thought, rock music, and unrecognized art. This background informs his tendency to work with any available and found materials: fragments of canvas, stone, old photographs, obsolete furniture (including the frame of a chair from which he constructed his first urban drum), clay, slate, and found objects.

©: Zitta, by contrast, developed within a more academic and structured environment. Throughout her life, she has remained in a state of intellectual and artistic inquiry: studying, analyzing, writing, filming, and combining artistic and critical perspectives. At the same time, she emphasizes that it is precisely within the underground, rather than the institutional mainstream, that the energy, density, and genuine intensity of artistic experience and gesture are most often concentrated.

Today, the internal dynamics of this partnership are enriched by another perspective, that of their daughter Aurelia, who is increasingly participating in collaborative projects with her parents. She has already taken part in several international and local exhibitions and projects.