Almaty-Berlin
photography, video installation,digital art
contact: almagul2@gmail.com
Almagul Menlibayeva
CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRAL ASIA / KAZAKHSTAN
American-Eurasian art advisors Llc.
69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Oberhausen, Germany;
Artificial Intelligence, current political issues and films between cinema and museum.
"Artificial intelligence as a tool
Artificial intelligence has arrived in short film. The Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva, for example, uses artificial intelligence in AI Realism. Qantar 2022 to illustrate statements by people who were persecuted and mistreated during the 2022 protests in Kazakhstan."
Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present.
Conceived by the late Okwui Enwezor and curated by the Foundation’s Director Hoor Al Qasimi, Sharjah Biennial 15 (SB15) reflects on Enwezor’s visionary work, which transformed contemporary art and has influenced the evolution of institutions and biennials around the world, including the Sharjah Biennial. The Biennial is being realized with the support of the Sharjah Biennial 15 Working Group and Advisory Committee.
2023 EVENTS & exhibitions
GRANTS and SUPPORTERS
Manga-Masken im Krieg. POLITISCHE KUNST IN KASACHSTAN, VON KERSTIN HOLM, ALMATY, The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung- German daily newspaper;
To see more works at Photography and LightBox or Video
At Sharjah Biennial 15, Menlibayeva presents The Tongue and Hunger. Stalin’s Silk Road (2022–2023),
a multimedia installation that tells the story of the artist’s family during the Kazakh Famine of the early 1930s, in which roughly one third of the Kazakh population perished as a result of collectivisation and forced sedentarisation. Its centerpiece is a film inspired by her great-aunt Bopish, who integrated herself into the Soviet Union’s social system amid widespread deprivation and the disappearance of her two children. The film alongside a research book and a post-digital textile contribute both academic and personal narratives on the use of engineered famine and forced labour to deplete the region’s natural resources and end the Kazakh nomadic way of life, all of which fuelled the USSR’s economic growth. Also on view is Archipelago Karlag (2016), a film that interweaves interviews with former labour camp prisoners from Kazakhstan’s capital city of Karaganda with scenes of a fictionalised Joseph Stalin receiving a guided tour through the Museum of Victims of Political Repression. Throughout
the film, Menlibayeva explores the exploitation
of unethical labour by totalitarian regimes to buttress the economy, drawing parallels between the centrality of the Gulag system to Soviet growth and the apparel industry under global capitalism..
REVIEW AND PRESS 2023
VIDEO CLUB, Video Club is a screening series that highlights the Stedelik Museum's collection of time-based media. In thematically organized selections, Video Club presents videos that span diverse eras, regions, and artistic movements.
The rotating screening program puts moving image into dialogue with prominent issues and motifs that recur throughout the museum's collection.
Titled Social Dance, the works in this iteration of Video Club reflect on movement and intervention in public space. In the late 1960s VALIE EXPORT created tense, intimate interventions in public space, either through inviting passersby to touch her breasts within her Tap and Touch Cinema or by performing simple movements on escalators. Through interactions with bystanders, Almagul Menlibayeva challenges the symbolic meaning of the bride while wandering the streets of Almaty, Kazakhstan. Cauleen Smith's surprise performance in Chicago's Chinatown places the performers' body in relation to local urban history by playing a musical composition by jazz composer Sun Ra. Francis Alÿs presents a view on a bustling town square where the tension of being watched becomes heightened. The six works show how through the interactions between the different players (performers, spectators, space, and camera) they all join in a social dance. Stedelik Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands;