«Dialogue with fire» by Askhat Akhmediyarov (online premiere)

Video
Duration: 11 min.
Courtesy Tse Art Destination Gallery

Dialogue with fire is a video work featuring portraits taken in the wilderness of the Kazakh steppes, by burning the vegetation on the ground to outline the faces of important figures of tolerance in Kazakhstan and Nobel Peace Prize people.

Askhat Akhmediyarov

Born in 1965 in Uralsk, Kazakhstan. Lives and works near Astana.

The work of Askhat Akhmediarov is curious and inventive in an undisciplined way. Hardly assignable to a particular category, his paintings combine pictorial tradition and contemporary designs, precise and disordered lines, realistic figures and abstract shapes. A creative freedom also appears in the choice of his subjects, sometimes surrealists. His work deals with ambiguities and irony and plays on various forms of modernity—television, consumerism, urbanisation—into “traditional” Kazakhstan. His evocative and metaphorically charged imagery investigate issues of his country caught between two worlds. The mixtures of cultures are certainly sources of emancipation and artistic effervescence but they also embody the risk of dissolving Kazakh identities. Through his work, the artist makes the viewer sensitive to the dissonances of a world in full transition.