Nurbol Nurakhmet: Panopticon

Nurbol Nurakhmet (b. 1986) is a Kazakhstani artist, working in painting, collage, drawing and lithography. He lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he trained at the Kazakh National Academy of Art. He also studied at the Academy of Art at the University of San Francisco in the USA, from 2010-2012.

Nurakhmet’s work demonstrates how the depiction of the body can convey both the complex inner world of the individual and the socio-political climate of a nation. In this way, his work oscillates between the personal and the collective. Nurakhmet’s figures are often depicted nude, with obscured features, or without skin or heads. This unnerving depiction of the

human figure alludes to the violation of human rights in Kazakhstan and the experienced loss of identity, histories and cultures. The artist also explores the cultural history of his native country by planting cultural and political figures within his work. Yet, reflecting on the state of the Kazakh nation in this contemporary global moment, the artist often depicts locations that are places of both leisure and protests in Kazakhstan’s recent past.

Nurakhmet has been included in exhibitions internationally, including Eurasian Utopia: Post Scriptum at the Suwon I’Park Museum of Art (2018, Suwon, South Korea), At the Corner: City, Place, People at the Tselinny Centre for Contemporary Culture (2018, Almaty, Kazakhstan), and Suns and Neons above Kazakhstan at the Yarat (2017, Baku, Azerbaijan). The artist has also held solo exhibitions, including Unconscious in A. Kasteev Museum of Arts (2014, Almaty, Kazakhstan) and most recently, Nurbol Nurakhmet: Split in Aspan Gallery (2019, Almaty, Kazakhstan.)

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Punishment, 2020, 75 x 76 cm.

Writing in 1975, Donald Winnicott ruminated, “the word psyche ... means the imaginative elaboration of somatic parts, feelings, and functions, that is, of physical aliveness”.1 The psyche or mind, is rooted in the body, as the inherent condition of ‘aliveness’. In dialogue with Winnicott, Nurakhmet’s recent works explore the intricacies of inhabiting a body as a site of subjectivity, politics and memory. His paintings and collages depict the indwelling of the psychical in the somatic and how this embodied subjectivity impacts our perceptions of self and the spaces we inhabit.

Punishment documents a shift from the human to animal body in the artist’s work. The images were born from the artist’s visit to a family member’s farm who have moved from the city to seek more agency and freedom. Yet, the decisions made by the government continued to impact the farm. For example, in correlation with the financial market, tools, feed and animals increased in price. The light that seeps into the barn does not follow the conventional symbolism of goodness but connotes the inescapability of authority.

1 Donald Winnicott, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-analysis (London: Hogarth Press/Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1975), p. 243. NB: The italics are Winnicott’s own.

Much like the light that can pour into the cracks of the stables, power can infiltrate even the most remote communities, highlighting that the political is always personal.

Moreover, the horses depicted are being punished for trespassing into another’s land or refusing to return home. With the horses confined within the barns – their backs turned and heads bowed as if inshame – this painting evokes ideas of surveillance, and of enforcing control through the autonomy, comfort, and sensations of another’s body. Nurakhmet’s use of the animal body, in dialogue with works of the human form,

illustrate the interconnection between the body, subjectivity, power and discipline.

Therefore, the artist tackles the intricacies of what he terms ‘biopolitics.’ Working

with the idea of the panopticon, Nurakhmet critiques a government that reduces its citizens to bodies and statistics. His engagement with biopolitics thinks through this Foucauldian idea of the body as highly-surveyed data, but he also conveys the violence and domination that accompanies the transformation of subjectivities into visceral objects.

A striking example of this transformation can be seen in Short Cut, where the bodies of protestors are depicted nude, with missing limbs, and faceless. Placed within the setting of the street, amongst the empty lorries that collect and contain arrested protestors, the identities of these figures are reduced to their status as ‘disruptors’. They have been stripped of their unique bodily features, and so, by extension, their own unique identities.

This de-subjectification is taken to its most extreme in Cosmonauts, where even bodies are desublimated to raw meat. Taking inspiration from photographs of protestors being arrested in Kazakhstan, the artist captures the gestures of the body while flaying its defining features. This violent stripping of individual identity and subjectivity visually conveys the government’s brutalising perception of its everyday citizens as a material that can be objectified, conditioned or manipulated.

Short Cut, 2021, 200 x 240 cm.

Cosmonauts, 2021, 200 x 200 cm.

Yet, power can manifest in subtler ways which Nurakhmet captures in pieces such as Waiting Room, where feelings of being lost or stuck become intense ramifications of an authority’s abuse of power. In predominant western thought, boredom is accompanied by a sense of freedom and possibility. Historically, it has been understood as a product of leisure, as people became free of the demands of subsistence and began to acquire time on their hands that needed filling. Psychologist Adam Phillips describes boredom as “suspended animation of desire” that is steeped in potential

and hope.2 But this perception begins to unravel when Nurakhmet depicts a boredom that is imposed upon an individual involuntarily. As the Kazakhstani government makes employment almost impossible, many are left to feel useless, and without direction and purpose. Within the scene, the exact location is hard to place. There is often no sense of time passing in painting; figures are immortalised in portraits, fruits and vegetables cannot rot in still lives, and landscapes remain untouched. Yet, in works such as Waiting Room, there is a sense of time endlessly passing without end or resolution. This inability to pinpoint a specific time or location, or to reach a resolution, accentuates the unreconciled world that the artist depicts in his works.

Disciplines such as psychoanalysis often equate significance to intensity; it assigns importance to experiencing the extremities of grief, desire, and trauma. Waiting Room portrays the severity of seemingly milder psychological states, spotlighting the frustration, existentialism and self-criticality sparked by alienation, isolation and neglect. In this way, Nurakhmet overturns the model of the Panopticon by illustrating how the reductive and critical gaze of authority can be internalised and projected onto oneself. Perhaps the most compelling quality in Nurakhmet’s work is the way in which he explores the personal and political intricacies of inhabiting a body; how they can feel like a claustrophobic cage of control, and an open expanse of memories.

2 Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Ticking and Being Bored (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 78.

Waiting Room, 2018, 200 x 200 cm.

Garden Time, 2021, 150 x 150 cm.

This multiplicity is evident in the way Nurakhmet constructs his environments; the square around the contorted body in Object of Information can be both an open plinth or enclosed room, or the inky sky in Garden Time can evoke both a wide expanse or confined darkness.

The intimate symbolism within Garden Time renders the artist emotionally exposed before his audience. Yet, unlike Cosmonauts and Short Cut, this exposition is saturated with subjectivity. Multiple bodies of the artist and his childhood dog wander between the apple trees of his family’s garden, a space that is heavily connected to memories of his family. By transforming these memories into tangible form, Nurakhmet uses the act of painting as a practice to uncover forgotten memories, explore an internal landscape of loss and grief, and understand both himself and his psyche with greater compassion and understanding.

Creating images of tenderness, memory and loss, in juxtaposition to scenes of discipline, control and power, Nurakhmet’s recent works oscillate between the extremes of subjectivity and objectivity. He illustrates bodies that are complex, unresolved, and constantly becoming, demonstrating how the status of the body is always contingent upon the physical, politicaland psychic spaces in which it resides.

Object of Information, 2020-21, each 100 x 70 cm.

IADA would like to express gratitude to the artist Ada Yu for collaboration and support of this project.