places like France and Luxembourg. With
significant exhibitions planned abroad
in 2017 for its artists in Kiev and Baku,
Kazakhstan is exporting culture to an ever-
increasing audience of global art consumers
while seeking to build capacity at home.
However, the country is also reeling from
an economic crisis, reporting diminishing
returns from energy reserves as a result of
the 2014 downturn. According to the World
Bank, Kazakhstan’s GDP growth shrank
from 4.1 percent to 1.2 percent in 2015,
and then contracted another 0.1 percent
during the first half of 2016, which led to
recent devaluations of the Kazakh currency,
the tenge. In 2015, budget cuts across the
economy affected the cultural sector, which
had been operating under policies that
assumed the stability of high energy prices.
The state budget for film and television,
both important media for the promotion
of Kazakh national identity, was also cut
in 2016, further signaling the decline of
cultural spending.
Sensing years of belt-tightening ahead,
arts institutions and spaces are increasingly
relying on private funding while more
grassroots groups embrace the growing
momentum of DIY spirit and community
outreach. Locally organized and funded
events are attempting to draw the attention
of global and local audiences to Kazakh
artists being nurtured by these programs.
As these groups rely primarily on private
funding, they have the freedom to explore
and push artistic boundaries beyond that
of the traditional arts and handicrafts
focus of government-funded museums
and exhibitions, and have embraced
contemporary art as the medium for this
new movement.
One such example is the country’s
International Festival of Contemporary
Art, Artbat Fest, which is supported by
private sponsors as well as the curators
and organizers themselves. Now in its
eighth year—it was founded in 2010 by
Igor Sludskiy and his son Vladislav—Artbat
embodies the DIY spirit and contemporary
arts movements propelling the Kazakh
art community forward. Taking its
name from well-known street for art in
Almaty—Arbat—it was initially conceived
as a European-style art festival, showing
Kazakh and international artists working
in a diversity of media. Now organized by
Vladislav and Olga Vesselova, it focuses
on public art, community outreach and
sustainability. Monthlong public art events
utilize the entire city—lush acres of park
and public transport sites included—
as a space to showcase specifically
commissioned installations and new works.
The festival also applies cultural
educational models with its “School of
Artistic Gesture” program, in which a series
of lectures and talks seeks to engage critically
with those in the art community. This
spotlight on contemporary arts pedagogy and
critical discourse is becoming increasingly
common throughout Kazakhstan. In
2016, the country’s first contemporary art
publication and paper-based platform for
exhibition and dialogue was founded. Titled
Aluan, it is spearheaded by Berlin-based
Kazakh artist Gaisha Madanova and German
curator Thibaut de Ruyter, and is intended to
be an “exhibition” of curated contemporary
art and visual content. Published in Kazakh,
Russian and English, the magazine also
strives to introduce Kazakh artists to the
global art community.
According to arts professionals such as
prolific Kazakh writer, curator and academic
Yuliya Sorokina of AsiaArt+, a public
foundation for the arts that she co-founded
in 1996, young art professionals would
benefit from such additional platforms that
expose them to new ideas and media. In
Sorokina’s view, a more holistic approach
needs to be employed for the art scene toenjoy organic sustained growth. In addition
to strengthening arts education across
the board, grassroots initiatives that focus
on creative development and critique
offer Kazakh artists the opportunity to
create a vibrant and discursive art scene
that is competitive on the global market.
Applying this method, Sorokina curated
an exhibition of young artists for the
seventh Artbat Fest, “City in Motion,” in
2016, which consisted of a three-month-
long curatorial school designed to support
emerging contemporary art students from
Kazakhstan and abroad. The resulting work
by over 26 artists, including Almaty-based
Bakhyt Bubikanova and Moldova-based
Alexandru Raevschi, was exhibited at the
shuttered Almaty Tram Depot, activated by
the festival in part to introduce the public to
new possibilities for engaging with art.
The new economic reality in Kazakhstan
has pushed the arts community to
recalibrate on its own terms and promote
projects that speak directly to not only
Kazakh curators and artists, but also the
local residents. Although energy prices are
forecasted to rise again in 2017, and funding
to soft industries such as arts and culture
can be expected to return in some form,
real work toward a sustained contemporary
art community is being done in alternative
spheres by visionaries like Sorokina, Sludskiy
and Vesselova of Artbat Fest, and Madanova
of Aluan magazine, who are catalysts for a
new art discourse. Because these projects
are growing in tandem with the rebuilding
of the local community, they are where
authentic contemporary Kazakh identity is
being explored and interrogated, proving
that arts and culture will play an ever-
increasing role in shaping Kazakhstan’s
post-oil identity.ROMAN ZAKHAROV’s mural The Driver of the Tram (2016)
at the Almaty Tram Depot, as part of Artbat Fest 7. Photo by
Theo Frost and Anna Assonova. Courtesy Eurasian Cultural
Alliance, Almaty.Kazakh artist SAULE DYUSSENBINA’s web installation in the exhibition “Symbiosis,” Botanical Garden, Almaty, 2016. Photo by Theo Frost
and Anna Assonova. Courtesy Eurasian Cultural Alliance, Almaty.