Feb .11 2023 – Mar. 11, 2023

Saule Suleimenova's solo exhibition Milestone covers a broad period of practice from the 2000s to the 2020s and allows us to look at the development of artistic language through the lens of time, technique, subject matter, and a conceptual framework that also changes over the years. In the 2000s, Suleimenova works extensively with graphics, and the subjects of her works are cityscapes, still lifes, situations, and people at a certain distance from the critical and political. This rhetoric has been gradually changing since the derivatives crisis in 2007 and anticipates the series Astana Line, Somewhere in the Great Steppe, Qaldyk Estelik, and I am Kazakh, among others. The transition is particularly strong in the I am Kazakh, in which the artist, on the one hand, explores archival photographic materials of the past, and on the other hand, transfers scraps of this memory into the contemporary urban landscape, in some ways distilling the knowledge and feelings of earlier graphic series. From the more academic technique of wax engraving, Suleimenova comes to experiment with photo-printing and the further application of the elusive memory of the reach figures rendered in acrylic.

The language of expression underwent further changes after the ARTBAT FEST festival in 2014, for which the artist made her first Cellophane Painting, which in its initial stages has more in common with the graphic still lifes of the early noughties than with an already outlined political stance, which cannot be overlooked in the series Plastic Diary of Changes, Qandastar turaly Dastan. Plastic Diary of Changes, Qandastar Turaly Dastan, was created on the basis of photographic materials by anthropologist Zarina Mukanova.

The influence of one work on another, the change of focus of artistic research, as well as the history of modern Kazakhstan itself, within which these statements were born, resembles the process of grinding flour, where different grains, over time, become whole matter and constantly undergo changes in their form and content. Similar feelings are experienced by artists who for decades have been returning to questions that cannot be answered by one or a few words, but rather by a whole complex of knowledge, observations, life experience, and changing external circumstances.

The Milestone exhibition summarizes Suleimenova's various artistic practices created in the first two decades of the 21st century and offers the viewer a detailed look at the formal and substantive changes in her work, as well as invites reflection on how and why such changes have occurred.

Curator: Vladislav Sludskiy