Human Rights Watch Charity Gala dinner

Dates: 20 Nov 2014 – 20 Nov 2014

IADA is pleased to participate at Human Rights Watch annual Charity Gala dinner. During the evening the work of Askhat Akhmediarov from the series "Autumn Cleaning" will be presented. 

The work of Askhat Akhmediarov is curious, inventive, in a way undisciplined. 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 in surrealistic scenes, such as a painting of Adam and Eve with a laptop, or post-socialist portraits of Kazakh sweepers. His works can be analyzed at different levels of reading, playing of ambiguities and installing a critical distance, not without irony. The mixtures of cultures are certainly sources of emancipation and artistic effervescence but they also embody the risk of dissolving Kazakh identities. Through his works, Askhat Akhmediarov makes the viewer sensitive to the dissonances of a world in full transition. 

In his series  Autumn Cleaning the artist stages a need of renaissance. This personal quest for purification also echoes a sense of renewal that drives Kazakh contemporary creation. This dialectic between creation and destruction, which draws its sources in ancient myths, has indeed became an integral way of producing in contemporary art (Arman, Steven Parrino, Cai Guo Qiang...). Erase to start all over again does not simply refer to a vain cycle, but discovers new artistic possibilities, like a flat canvas suddenly taking the form of a living and complex architecture.