SELECTIONS delves into the world of acquisitions, exploring what museums and galleries have been adding to their collections in the past five years as well as featuring images and summaries of works and artists.
SAULE SULEIMENOVA
Bio: Kazakhstani, 1970
Title: Asharshylyk. Surviving Children, 2018
Medium: Plastic bags on polyethylene film
Size: 37 x 149 cm
Acquired by: Curator Aigerim Kapar
Artist represented by: Andakulova Gallery, Dubai
Acquisition date: March, 2020
Acquisition place: Kazakhstan
After the famine of 1932-33, the Soviet Union People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) searched the steppe, collected the surviving boys and sent them to an orphanage. Kazakh families tried to save the boys first of all, most of all by sacrificing the rest of the family. At the orphanage, the children grew up and by the beginning of the second war in 1941 were just the age of conscription. The children were sent to the war first, and often they died first as “cannon fodder” (according to M. Tatimov).
Copyright: Saule Suleimenova
Courtesy of Andakulova Gallery
SAULE SULEIMENOVA
Bio: Kazakhstani, 1970
Title: Immigrants in 1930s, 2018
Medium: Plastic bags on polyethene
Size: 140 x 149 cm
Acquired from: Curator Aigerim Kapar
Artist represented by: Andakulova Gallery, Dubai
Acquisition date: March, 2020
Acquisition place: Kazakhstan
The artwork ‘Residual Memory-5. Immigrants in 1930s’ talks about people forcibly exiled to Kazakhstan in the 1930s and forced to seek food in the steppe. In the “Residual Memory” project, I investigate certain periods of history recorded in rare, residual photos and video documents that are designated as historical traumas. While I am depicting these scenes in a collage of residual materials (plastic bags), I try to consider and understand how it happened, thus doing a kind of therapy of purification and acceptance. For a long time, information about these periods of history was hidden, not only at the official level but the people themselves preferred not to remember the trauma of the past. I suggest taking and feeling this time and so understanding ourselves better now.
Copyright: Saule Suleimenova
Courtesy of Andakulova Gallery
SAULE SULEIMENOVA
Bio: Kazakhstani, 1970
Title: KARLAG. Everyone Feels Well, 2018
Medium: Plastic bags, plastic film
Size: 130 x 149 cm
Acquired from: Curator Aigerim Kapar
Artist represented by: Andakulova Gallery, Dubai
Acquisition date: March, 2020
Acquisition place: Kazakhstan
Thirty-two concentration camps were created in Kazakhstan. The largest of them was Karlag, where my grandfather was a prisoner. He was a statistician historian, an associate of Saken Seyfullin, and tried to derive statistics from the victims of Asharshylyk, for which he was sentenced to 15 years. When he returned home in 1953, he was exhausted spiritually and physically, panicky and afraid of everything – loud voices, people in uniform – and died two weeks after his release. His wife, my grandmother, was also a prisoner of Algeria (Akmola camp for wives of traitors to the motherland). So their son and my father was born in the camps.
Copyright: Saule Suleimenova
Courtesy of Andakulova Gallery
A VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN PRINT IN SELECTIONS #55